Do Go On - 30 - Marvel Universe with NICK MASON!

Episode Date: May 18, 2016

This week, Jess has been on the road for a long time and while Dave and Matt miss her heaps, the show must go on! Enter: our good buddy Nick Mason from The Weekly Planet podcast! Nick tells us all about Marvel comics, films, characters and the universe. Twitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] the show and get rewards like bonus episodes:www.patreon.com/DoGoOnPod  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenji Amarna, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there. Canada, we are visiting you in September this year.

If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. And welcome to Do Go On. My name is Dave Warnocky, and I am sitting here with a man that I like to call Matt Stewart. Hello, Matt. That's me, obviously.

Yeah, great. And Matt, exciting news this week. Yeah, what's up? Well, usually I would introduce a third person to the equation now called Jess Perkins. Yeah, you should do that for sure. Can't wait until she gets here. Oh, God. It's going to be great.

I don't know how to tell Matt, but Matt, Jess is not coming this week What? She is away So I've bought in one of my bestest buds To fill in this week Could you please welcome our first ever guest of the show It's Mr Nick Mason

Hello Nick Hello! Oh, thank you You're unexpected, thank you very much Matt please clap a bit louder Are you an audible clap Clap on mic please Thank you Otherwise it sounds like one man clapping which was me

Great to be here So just to ease the transition for you guys. I have decided to dress as Jess Perkins style jumper. Yes, you were wearing a very Jess Perkins style jumper. I'm wearing her signature yellow jumper. She'll get it back after the recording. You look really good in it, Nick. I imagine all future guests will be having to wear Jess's hammy downs.

I hope so. You know, I mean, assuming that we'd ever need another guest. Well, Jess is on roadshow now. Well, that's why I said. We should, just for context, Jess is become a comedy superstar since starting this podcast, I will say. I will say that. Yeah. Since Matt and I invited her to be the third person on the show.

And correlation does imply causation. She has, exactly. She has overshot both of us, the original members of the show, and become a comedy superstar touring as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow around Australia. So we've got in, you, Mesao, you are one of our friends in real life. Friends in real life. But also you do... The highest compliment one can receive.

You listen to the show. I do a big fan, yeah. And you also do your own podcast. It's called the Weekly Planet, yeah. Fleet Planet, which... It's a really good podcast. Oh, stop it. Stop saying how good I am, guys.

It's my perfect kind of podcast, because it's about a thing I really like, but don't understand it all, you know, which is the superheroes in the cinemas. Oh, superhears. Is that kind of what it is? That's a perfect explanation. It's about the superheroes in the cinemas, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about a big blockbuster. We'll talk about a TV show, you know. Yeah. The stuff that makes up life. And it's all the stuff and I like, and then they explained things that I didn't get were important in those things. It's the best.

I'm just like, I've enjoyed Batman versus Superman, and then I get to listen to the weekly planet and find out why I shouldn't have enjoyed it. Shouldn't have enjoyed it. You're a bad person. Why you should retract your own opinions to yourself. Don't have an opinion. Don't have an opinion until somebody on the internet tells you what that opinion should be. That's always been my rule.

That's a good rule, and I'm mucked up with that one, because it turns out I was the only person in the world who enjoyed that movie. You're not alone. I know a lot of people who have enjoyed it. There are things I didn't enjoy, like the... I was going to say the Riddler, but it's not the Riddler. It's the main bad guy.

The Joker. Not the Joker. Yeah, I also thought he'd confused. Superman bad guy. Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor. Yeah. He was really annoying.

Not the Riddler. No. No. But I think he was annoying just because I think I just don't like that actor that much. Jesse Eisenberg. Yeah, not his fault. But, I mean, he was just sort of Jesse Eisenberg in it. Yeah, well, that version of the character is based on a real-life person,

Max Landis, who's a screenwriter. And that's like, that's a pitch-perfect impression. I haven't seen. Yeah, so he's a really good actor. I just found that character quite annoying. I haven't seen the movie, but they've decided to base a super villain on one of their friends that also writes movies. Yes.

That is what happened there. Is that an ultimate compliment or is that very offensive that one of the most famous bad guys of all time? They're like, no, no, screw his backstory. We're going to make it about you, you narcissistic bastard. You're definitely worse than a man who's repeatedly tried to destroy the world. There's something just nice about him, but you don't have any redeeming qualities. Not at all.

Oh, God, remember that script you wrote? Jesus. Boy. Right. Well, that's weird. See, they're the kind of things you don't know if you're just watching it. I want to know. So that's why you are here, Matt, so you are a triple threat. Let's just recap.

You are one of our friends. Threat number two. IRL. Threat number two in real life, that's right. Threat number two, you know the show that you're about to be on, this one, which you are already on. I'm on it right now. And that's a threat apparently. Number three, you are an expert in a field that Matt and I have been interested in, but have been too scared to dabble in on this show.

Yes, we've had it in the hat a bit. And we've repeatedly had people request any sort of... superhero based topics. Have you explained what this show is yet, Dave? We've explained what Mesa's show is. And to explain everything back together, threat number four coming from my mouth. Oh boy. She's going to bash us.

Actually, I imagine we might have some people that have never heard the show maybe that have come across from your podcast. So what happens is on this show, usually Matt Jesserai, take it in terms to research a topic, then report back to the class on the topic. And we've hoped that maybe we can invite you. to actually report to Matt and I. So usually for the show to start the report, the person given the report has a question that they post the others. And I imagine this week you're going to have some sort of superhero-based question

to get us onto whatever topic you've chosen in that realm. Yeah, okay. Look, well, my question was going to be and is, what company 20 years ago had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy? There were a company that were selling their own filing cabinets just to pay their end. Oh, Anset, Anset Australia. You're very close. You're nearly there.

Is it more superhero base? I imagine more super heroes. But now they have a, they're behind a film franchise that has, at this point, I think, a revenue of $18 billion. So things are turned around. Billion with a B. Billion with a B. Think about how many filing cabinets you can buy with a billion dollars. 18 billion.

18, at least 18. Really? Billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It's a solid gold. So I imagine there aren't very many options here. You've got D.C.

Maybe. You've got Marvel. Sony did the, what, the Spider-Man? Oh, yeah, that makes it. So there's, because there's, oh, this is confusing. Hopefully you'll be able to explain this, Mesa, but there's Sony, which is, is that Fantastic Four? No.

That's, that's, uh, that's Fox. So Fox is Fantastic Four. Fox, Sony is Spider-Man. Sony's Spider-Man, yeah. Marvel Cinematic? Then there's DC Warner Brothers? The answer, guys, is Marvel. Marvel.

It's Marvel. Is that true? They were selling filing cabinets. Yeah, so there's a comic book writer called Brian Michael Bendis, and he's done, I think he's done the most, he's written the most issues of Spider-Man. He's written like 300 issues of Spider-Man, and he started in 1996, and when he came to the...

The Marvel Bullpen, sort of their office sort of area, is sort of known as this, it's kind of this wild party situation, everybody's friends, and everybody's having a great time, and he went in expecting that, and he went in, and there was just, like, all the, like, it was all dark except for like one strip

of like benches and desks with a few people working there. This is in 1996 and like a big pile of filing cabinets in the corner and like near the door and he's like, what's going on there? And they're like, oh, we have to sell those. Where any fixture we don't need

is going out the door so we can pay the rent this month. So, yeah. Because Marvel is one of those giants where like it seems like it's been a success story forever. Yeah, right? If you've seen a Transformers movie, it seems like those movies have been going forever and it's this billion-dollar juggernaut kind of thing.

But in the 90s, that was on its last legs. They were producing little action figure transformers that didn't transform. Like, just as this last ditch attempt to kind of... Trying to cash in on the... Yeah, trying to catch in on... Non-transforming transformers. Yeah.

So you'd have to buy a separate transformed toy and then if you were playing with it, you have to throw one behind your back, whip it out, and go, Look, now it's a police car. You need to employ a little bit of misdirection and then switch him out, yeah. Well, that was pretty quick, wasn't it? Yeah, right? Now it's a tank.

But yeah, so Marvel is one of those, it's an institution now. But, yeah, it's had a rocky, it's had a very rocky road. Wow, and so that was when this guy, Ryan, Michael. Benders, was starting out. Yeah. He stayed for a long time. He did, yeah. Yeah, he's kind of, he's plotting a lot of the universe sort of right now.

It's his universe in a way. now he owns the filing cabinets yeah he gets as many filing cabinets as he wants yeah did they lose anything important like classic original copies of the things and stuff artwork and I imagine they just took them out of the filing cabinets oh right oh shit all those first editions were inside that filing cabinet sold for $18 that I mean that's kind of you know oftentimes you'll hear about somebody just you know unearthing a filing cabinet at a at an auction or something you know it just a a used goods auction and it's got first edition copies of something in it. And it's not unheard of.

Right. So what you're telling us is we should be buying filing cabinets. Yes, exactly. Invest in filing cabinets is my... Let's do it. I know what we're doing tomorrow. Anyway, so Marvel Comics. Great.

So Marvel Comics, it's a great topic. Yeah, so look, if we want to start talking about Marvel Comics, we should probably start talking about just comics in general. So comics are sort of the red-headed stepchild of just the art world. Like, they've never had... What is that a positive thing? Yeah, Matt says with his big red beard looking at us. Ah, look.

Look, they've never had the love they've deserved. Oh, okay. You know what I mean? They've never had the respect they deserve. And I think initially it's because comic books started, you know, newspapers had comic strips and comic books started essentially as collections of comic strips that had been sent into newspapers that weren't good enough to be in the newspaper. And if you've ever read a comic strip in a newspaper.

They're not that great. Look, from time to time, there's a good one. Robot Man. If you remember Robot Man. The ones that couldn't make it in, compiled. Compiled, yeah, and just sort of bound up and put out there for, you know, five cents or something like that. Often, yeah, there feels like they're just incomplete thoughts, those things. Often they are, often, especially if it's a sequential one, because it's like one panel of like what happened yesterday.

Yeah, what happened last week. And then one panel of action and then look what's coming around the corner for next time. Yes, it's like one panel a day. Yeah, right? It's a sweet con. Eventually, some quality stuff started getting put into the mix. There was a character called the yellow kid in sort of the late 19th century, and he was sort of like a, he was like a street urchin.

Matt has reeled back. Is it vaguely racist? It's not racist, no. He's called the yellow kid because he wears like a, he wore like a really oversized yellow night shirt. Is that us, is that, us being racist for? I guess it is. Well, it was that era, so it could have been.

But just relay you. I heard yellow and I had late 19th century and I thought, oh dear. Yes. But he was sort of this street urchin and he had adventures. Please define. You're going to have to stop a few times throughout the show and define these nerdy comic book terms. What the hell is a street urchin?

You know, a little kid. He's a youth and he lives out on the street. He just hangs out with his strange little friends. That's sort of matching some sort of sea an enemy. Oh, sure, right. Not just a little street tough kind of character. Sorry about that. And this strip was in William Randolph Hurst's newspaper.

It was in Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper. And it was like super, super popular. And it was so popular that it sort of gave rise to the term yellow journalism. Like, that's where that term comes from, because people would be like, oh, what newspapers do you read? And they're like, oh, the yellow newspapers, the yellow newspapers, because they were the newspapers that had the yellow kid in them. And so that eventually, and because, you know, Pulitzer and Hurst were known for, like, these sensationalist, you know, stories that not necessarily to do with the truth. They were like, oh, it's yellow journalism kind of thing. And that's where that term comes from.

But anyway, so eventually all these strips were collated into, like, this first, you know, sort of proto-comic. book of the Yellow Kid and that kind of sort of kicked it off a little bit. So that was a big seller. That was a big seller and it was like oh finally there's a little bit of quality to this. I'm surprised it goes so far back. Right, exactly, yeah.

Yeah, so anyway, comics sort of, but comics has a medium of like original content of not just collated and a strip. So that happened sort of 1933-ish. So we're going to skip, we're going to skip a few decades. Basically in about, I want to say about 1935, we had a company called National Allied Possible.

publications. Some of this might be a little dry, but we'll see how we go. Love it. And they produced their first comic book of all original material. It was called New Fun Comics, and it had like, you know, it was an anthology, so it was like, it was some prose story, there was some, you know, funny animal comics, and there was some like swashbuckler, daring do kind of musketeer kind of characters. There was like an occult detective called Dr. Occult, who was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who later, like a couple years later,

went on to create action comics number one, the character of Superman. Maybe you've heard of him? Yes, I definitely have. Yeah, yeah. Second only to the yellow kid in my house. I know, right? I noticed those two posters on the way in.

That's right. One is a lot bigger than the other. Yellow kid. Of course. So that sounds like a real mishmash, though. It's just like the variety show of comics. Yeah, it was kind of like throwing stuff at a wall. Trying to tick every box.

Seeing what's stuck. But Superman was this first... You like this? Yeah. Superman was the first thing to really change this universe because like prior to this you'd had like almost every comic like

we're talking to swashbucklers and musketeers and stuff like that but it was almost always like a regular human character maybe he's a detective he's got some you know blazing 45 automatics kind of thing he's just kind of you know it's more or less a regular guy but Superman who's this character looked like a circus strong man he could leap tall buildings in a single bound you know so I did want to ask this

Superman obviously big deal now say to most people superheels Superman probably comes to mind first. So he wasn't instant success. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. This was a phenomenon. This is something people hadn't ever seen.

And so he was the first ever superhero? Yes. He was the first of that mold. You'd have characters like The Shadow, now we'd call him more mystery men. Yeah. Yeah. There's technically like character

who sort of bridges the gap. He's called The Crimson Avenger, and he was like, he was sort of somewhere in the middle. He had like a red suit and a red trench coat and he kind of sort of cape like he was kind of somewhere in the middle but most people are like the golden age of comics kicked off with with superman you know when you see uh those images of man evolving from oh yes monkey to man like it starts with this

crimson dude ha ha ha ha ha the yellow kid growing up a little bit turning into what was the shadow the shadow the shadow the shadow man i like to call him in my house we've got nicknames for all the superiors you'll probably hear a few of those about the show and i miss remand but people's names. Then it's the crimson, then it's the Superman. Yeah. So, again, so... But when do you go from there?

Yeah. Well, where you go from there is you go to a guy called Martin Goodman. He was the son of some Lithuanian immigrants. Now, that is a recipe for a superhero. I know, right? So he was the eldest of 13 children. You're from a big family, Matt. I am, yeah.

Well, my dad is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. A family of 13. And? Do you think? And Lithuanian is your nation. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Well, it says the eldest of 13 recorded children. So, who knows. Yeah. All my uncles and aunties have been recorded. Oh, that's definitely. Yes. I think it's me. You're Spider-Man.

Yeah. Is this true? We're about to talk about Spider-Man? No, that comes away. Oh, right, damn. Sorry, I'm sorry to get you helped up there. You're a Lithuanian man. So he grew up in the Great Depression.

He grew up. He lived in a lot of hobo camps. We find it funny that they call it the Great Depression. Right. Doesn't sound like a fun time from all accounts I've read. Please do go on. Oh, sorry. So he just sort of drifted across the United States.

But in 1920, he was hired by a company called Eastern Distributing Corporation to work in like a magazine publishing company. And he sort of learned some of that sort of skill, I guess. And it didn't help him a lot because like three years later that company went bankrupt and he was sort of out on the street again. But he sort of learned that skill and he sort of picked up a lot of that skill and he kind of became sort of an aspiring businessman. and then he got into publishing kind of thing.

And he saw the success of Superman. He's like, okay, I've got to jump on this. I've got to jump on this superhero phenomenon. And he founded a company called Timely Publications. And basically what would happen in a lot of cases with comic book companies is they didn't have an in-house team. What they had is they had a comic, they hired a comic book packager,

which was basically like an off-site team of people who just wrote and drew stuff at home. and you would just call them up and you'd be like, I need some superheroes, I need some characters, I need some funnies, I need some one panel jokes,

stuff like that, just put some together for me and just chuck them over. So just throw ideas out of them. Telephone, man, that'll do it. Yeah, exactly, right? Put it together. Yeah, and so...

See him on that. He put together a test comic called Marvel Comics No. This is in 1939. And so where did you get the word Marvel from? Is this something like he just thought that sounds like a great idea? Marvel comics, that'll do?

Marvelous, right? It's all about fantastical. Uh-huh. Is that what a, because that's kind of, Marvel's not a really big, big word apart from, like if you hear Marvel now, it just means... Yeah, but you can marvel at something. No, totally, you totally can,

but no one really uses it like that anymore, but I think it's now just owned by comics. So I wonder if it was just more common back then. It might have been, it is definitely very snappy, I think it's just something you pulled out of the air. Was DC around at this stage? Yes, that are national,

So Superman was D.C. from the start? Yes. They were called National Allied and a couple of, what happened is a couple of years later, they produced a comic called Detective Comics, which, and Detective Comics number 27 was the first appearance of Batman, and that kicked right off. People were hugely in favour of that. And then there was some sort of ownership shake-up, and like one guy left and one guy was replaced and all that sort of thing. So they put the company back together and they're like, well, let's call it Detective Comics. Oh, right. They reformed the band without the drummer. exactly that's exactly what happened yeah Gotcha I'm a Batman or Superman

I'm a Batman guy I'm also a Batman guy What about you Dave I'll definitely pick a Batman over a Superman Yeah that's interesting Is that common A lot of people Find Superman really really boring

Yeah I think that's the key My main beef Yeah if you say why is Superman Who's your least favorite superhero Most people say Superman You say why And it's a one dimensional Goody 2 shoes

And he's boring And nothing can hurt him Except kryptonite Now Yes we do say that, would you come back at us and say that's correct, or do you think that as a bigger fan of comics? I am a big, I'm a big fan. I'm actually a big fan of Superman. What happened, the problem with Superman is that, like all those things that I've just said, they were also a problem for the writers

of Superman. Like, it's hard to have him, like, throw some planets around in one issue, and then the next issue, he's fighting some bank robbers, and he's having trouble fighting the bank robbers. You're like, why is, like, how do you write around that? And that was really difficult. So, like, in the, in the 80s, DC had this event called Crisis on Infinite Earths where basically they went, okay, we're going to make some changes

to this, we're going to simplify everything, and there's too much stuff in our universe, we'll just, we'll have this event happen and we'll change everything. And what they did is they depowered Superman quite significantly. Like, he was still a very powerful character,

but he wasn't, like if you hit him hard enough, it'd have hurt. It didn't have to be like a kryptonite bullet or a, you know, what have you. What happened is that they never really told the people who made the movies because they made the Christopher,

the Christopher Reeves Superman in 1979 and he was this one who could fly around the world in reverse time and do all these crazy things and I guess they were like well we can't really change it now so in the movies he's always been this guy who can do anything and that's not really very exciting but the comic book version like they went like he doesn't have those many powers let's give him more depth as a character and and that's still true to this day in comic book world yeah it is yeah oh right that's interesting but just not in like not in the movies still yeah oh they've gone more of a way to it I think in these last couple of movies.

Whether people enjoy them as movies or not is remains to be seen. I mean, not really. A lot of people hate them. Only one person who's enjoyed them and it's sitting in this room right now. You're sitting in this room, yeah. Well, I mean, it was very long, and I'd say I enjoyed more than half of it. So, that's like, that's a good time? Is that a good review?

If you saw a movie, you enjoyed 51% of it? Wow, I'd say 65% of it. That's an even better pass. That's a credit. That's a C-M-M-M-Rewing. Minus, maybe? Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, Marvel Comics number one had some characters like the Human Torch. Oh. Not the fantastic poor Human Torch. The original Human Torch was an android. Okay. Different character. The Human Torch was an android? The original one was, yeah.

He was created in a lab. He was, yeah. Could he still flame on? Yes, he could, yeah. Did he say the words Flame Arm? Yes, from time to time he did. Oh, that's cool. So he was, so he was an android.

He's not human. Was he a torch? Could he flick on or not? Was he like a dolphin torch? Yeah, in many ways he was. He was more of a battery powered. So half of his name was true. Yeah, he was a torch.

Okay. He's certainly not human. He was good in an emergency. Well, I don't know what to believe. But kept on top of the fridge. Yeah. Great. Also, another character then was Namor the Submariner,

who's sort of an Aquaman-style character. He's still in use today. Namor. Name all the Submariner. Was he some sort of android? No, he's from the Lost City of Atlantis. Oh. He's from the...

He's a... Submarina. Yeah, correct. That means he's from below the... Imagine like a mighty man wearing like green swim trunks, and he's got little wings on his ankles and enable him to fly. Kieran Perkins. It's Kieran Perkins with little wings.

Knew it. I was going to say, I just imagined myself. Was Kieran Perkins based on him? I think so, yeah. He trained every day thinking you are Namor. One day I'm just going to be... One day I'm just going to leap out of this pool and just fly. So Namelo the Submariner was actually the first character.

the first superhero could fly. Because up until this point, Superman was just a leap tall buildings and a single bound guy. He hadn't yet gained the... Big jumper. Yeah, it was a big, more of a jumper. Right.

Yeah. Was he already from the planet... The planet Krypton? He was from the planet Krypton. Yeah, he was... And he grew up on a farm all the whole time? No, the original incarnation of Superman arrived on Earth as an adult man. Right.

He still pretended to be mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. What happened is... Lady is, some people emailed. People didn't email. They said a letter like they did back in the day and they said, hey, what was Superman like as a boy? And they're like, well, we should do the adventures of Superboy. And so they created these additional stories of him.

And they're like, okay, well, he arrived on Earth as an infant and he was raised by the Kent's. And when he was a kid, he had adventures as Superboy. Because that added something to it, right? That whole growing up on it as a simple farmer. I think so, yeah. That gave him some... Yeah, gave him some good old-fashioned family value.

And some farming cred. Yeah, that's right. You always had a laboring job just in case things went wrong at the journalism factory. Technical term. Thank you. So, Marvel Comics number one. So actually, to give you some background nowadays, if you publish a comic book and it sells maybe 30,000 copies,

that is knocked out of the park. That is, if you've bloody hit it for six, that's a great. So that's like a platinum album. That's a good result. So the first issue of Marvel Comics in 1939 sold 80,000 copies. And then they were like, well, we'd be. have sold out will we'll reprint it again and then they sold 800,000 copies so that's so that's pretty impressive well so name more and human torture were very popular yeah absolutely are

they very quickly got their own titles what what basically happened is goodman's like okay i'm on a good thing here i've i've made my money back from funnies incorporated so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make this in-house so what he did is he went to the staff at funnies incorporated and he was like i'm going to grab some people out of this so he get he got he got this writer called Joe Simon, who he wanted as the editor of his comic book company, and he got a guy called Jack Kirby. Oh, I've heard of him. See, he's very important in the world of comic books, Marvel especially.

And he also got, he had, his cousin by marriage was a 16-year-old kid looking for work at the time, and he really needed a job. And so he moved across country to work at timely publications. his name was Stanley Lieber. Oh. It was probably better known as Stan Lee. Oh, I've heard of him. And he was only 16 when he joined the climate of work.

So he grew up sort of in the upper west side of Manhattan, sort of, you know, middle class. And he'd often, he's later said, you know, it's the feeling the most important thing for a man is to have work to do, to be busy, to be needed. Like that was his philosophy. And he, so he was, he did a half, come, you know, a few little jobs. He wrote advanced obituaries for the news.

So like, just in case. people would die. Like his famous celebs die. Yeah, exactly. He'd write those in advance. He did publicity for a hospital, I think. He worked in like a theatre project. But yeah, so his cousin was married to Martin Goodman, and he was, you know, in the comic

book world. So he got a gig as like, they're gopher, you know, just around the office doing, you know, bits and pieces. And he sort of almost immediately started writing scripts for this, you know, this new business. So, and he would sign them Stanley, as opposed to Stanley. Lever. He'd said that his anecdote has always been that

he wanted to save his real name for when he would write the Great American novel. So he was like, look, it, so Stanley, if you've never, if you don't know anything about Stan Lee, you've probably still still seen Stanley. Like if you've seen a Marvel movie, you've seen Stanley

because he's in almost all of them. He's got a, he's like, he's an old man, he's got like aviated sunglasses and like a caterpillar mustache, and he speaks in a New York accent, and he appears in the Marvel movies at some point. Like there's always a countdown until he appears in the movies. Like a friend of mine recently went and saw Deadpool at the, you know,

one of the Marvel movies at the cinema. It was during the school holidays. And he, you know, it was filled with, you know, teenage kids or whatever. And he sits down and he looks to his left and a couple of seats to his left. There's like a 60-year-old woman probably and like her 85, 90-year-old mom. And he's like, oh, no, they've stumbled into this by mistake. Oh, no. This is

This is not the best exotic Mar and Goldho's like too Exactly And like 10 minutes in There's been like language and sex And people being decapitated and what have you And he's like Suddenly this becomes the new movie

Just turning over to watch their reaction That's right And he's like oh I'm so This is uncomfortable for me This must be uncomfortable for them They can't leave what have you And then all of a sudden it goes to a strip club And like the owner of the strip club

Stan Lee And the six year old woman goes Look mom, it's Stan Lee And they're like yay So like he's this Yeah He's um he's a character

you can't really talk about Marvel without talking about Stanley for good or ill oh is there ill there is a little bit of ill we'll get to it a little bit but um so he started writing scripts for this

um so in about 1940 1940 um Jack Kirby and Joe Simon they create a character originally to be called Super American but instead

Joe Simon was like now there's too many super characters already so we'll make this guy Captain America so 1940 they released Captain America this is before America enters the war so this is like a year before Pearl Harbour was bombed

but like the war has started but the first issue the cover is him punching Hitler like that's they've started out strong yeah um and that's hold a million copies so that was

that was a strong start like immediately like a million copies um then they had a market in that era yeah yeah yeah anyway uh so so Stanley became this gopher at this place he was writing script and he meets Jack Kirby and so the story goes that, you know,

Stan Lee is this, you know, he's this really cheerful guy, he's really animated, he leaps around the office, he plays an ocarina in the office. I don't know if you know what an ocarina is, it's a little... Pan-pipes or something.

It's a little pan-pipe kind of situation. Fans of the Legend of Zelda will know it from the game, the Ocarina of Time. It's a little... And he plays that. He played it in the office. I wonder who's hit with his 60s.

Kirby was, you know, quite a few years older and he was just like hunched over his desk smoking a cigar. He was already jaded from the... Yeah, exactly. And so... Sounds like Martin from the Simpsons, just prancing about... Around with his lute? Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And then Jack Kirby's like, oh, for fuck sake. I'm so... I'd forgotten about Stanley, but he... In my head, he must have invented Marvel. Because, you know, it's weird that he gets that cameo and everything. It's like he is Marvel, but he wasn't necessarily, I guess. Yeah, well, he wasn't, we'll get to it a little bit, but I guess he was the guy who stuck around the longest. So he started in, you know, 1939.

And he's still alive. So, so, and he, you know, he would, he provided some tweaks to the, you know, he would write scripts and he provide some tweaks to stuff. Like he would, like, Captain America, for example, he originally had like a, like a shield that was shaped like a, like a medieval kind of like a, a, like a shield. That classic sort of shield. Yeah, like classic shield. And then another company who later became Archie Comics were like, you can't use that. It's too similar to one of our characters, the shield.

You can't sort of have to change it. But it can only be one superhero with a shield. Exactly. And so they changed it to this round shield, which is the one you see in the movies. And Stanley was like, okay, have it in this issue. You have him throw the shield. And it's like this kind of boomerang kind of like thrown weapon. And people are like, oh, that'll catch on.

And that's, like, that's now he's kind of, that's Captain America's signature movie. So he's kind of like a Sydney Shineberg type character. I don't know if you know familiar with Sydney's work, but Dave, oh yeah. He was the one who fixed up back to the future in some ways. Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Give it some tweaks, give it some juice. He gave some sweet cheek, some of them didn't come off.

No, that's right. He throws out 50 ideas hoping to get too good ones. Right, yeah. That's the Shenberg. Absolutely, yeah. That's the Seanberg way. Yeah, like all Stanley, you know, for decades he's just been a showman.

Like, he puts 100% into everything he does. Even the pan pipes. Even the pan pipes, exactly. But, like, so Kirby and Simon, who created, you know, Captain America, they, you know, they created it, they sold a million copies of the first issue. And then... And Stanley's still given, like, tweaks as, like, a 17-year-old kid. Yeah, that's right.

How about this? And so these two ran afoul of Goodman, they're like, you know what? We're out. We're going to leave. Who, sorry? Kirby and Simon. The creators of Captain America They're like, you know what, we need

You know, we want a little more But you're not giving us anything else So we're just gonna take off But so basically at this point Stan Lee who was 19 I think 18 or 19 Goodman's just like Okay, you're the editor in chief now

You're the editor-in-chief Of timely And so he stuck around to that You're there with the pan pipes You're in charge Like you're moxie, you're in And he and he held that position For basically two decades

Like I like that But also you become the top dog at 19 you would expect by the age of 40 that you'll be the president or something and then of the country and then in 20 years you're like still still is not

yeah still got that 19 year old job and it like it wasn't it wasn't necessary like 20 years last that's a full career essentially you don't think but Stanley I think is 93

he doesn't feel like 93 but he's he's been there since the beginning but like except for like there was three years he was in the army so that was you know there's a little

Yeah, right, I can't picture him in the army But he's on so many cameos Yeah, exactly He's played every different profession He could be a general Yeah Yeah, so but I think he was never really He was never 100% happy there

I think partly because Goodman was this trend chaser Like, so after the war Superhero comics were a little bit Significantly in decline So a superhero punching Hitler on the front cover's not selling as many No, exactly And the boss is like, What's wrong?

This used to be great. He used to love this. Oh, you mean he's been punched to death? Oh. Oh, okay. So like... Just punch him with the other hand. Yeah.

So like, even Superman and Batman fell out of fashion. So for example, like, there was a company at the time who did a, like, they did a cops and robbers series. It was called Crime Does Not Pay. And so Goodman was like, oh, we should come up. So he was like, okay, we've got to make some knockoffs. And so in response to Crime Does Not Pay, he released Crime Must Lose, exclamation mark. Oh, my God. can't win. That was another one. Lawbreakers always lose. Like that was kind of...

Crime, it does not pay. Definitely does not pay. Yeah. So, like, and so every time the wind shifted. So like in... It feels like crime does pay if you can rip people off like that and make money from it. Yeah, so like romance was big in like the late 40s, like 1948, like romance and like teen adventures. Are you doing Marvel romance? Yeah, Marvel, Marvel. Again, when you think of Marvel, you're like superhero, superhero, superheroes, But it went through all kinds of... Really? Yeah, so like...

Was ever a weird porn phase? No, although, I think at one point... Comic book porn? I think they had some sister companies that were into more like adult. We'll get to more adult stuff, I think, in a couple of minutes, but like... So, the 1940s, there was all these romance into...

Because, like, also, there was a company called Archie Comics, and it was like, you know, America's, you know, most lovable teen, it's Archie Andrews kind of thing, and he was in a love triangle with Betty and Veronica, and all these

fun little high school adventures The Goodman was like We need a character called Farching Well that's the thing Like he created a character Well a character was created

called Patsy Walker Um He was like okay Archie Andrews Like he has this red hair And it's got like Specific crotch Crosshatching in the hair

You should have her Have that same Crosshatching in the hair Like he was He was a micromanager At that point Where he's just like Okay

The Secret must be in the hair To his success Give her the same hair Fun fact for you a maniac. Yeah, he's like, I started this comic pretty closely. Yeah. It's definitely the hair that's sitting this fun.

Fun fact, Patsy Walker from 1948, still around as a character. She eventually became the superhero Hellcat. And she's in, if you watch the Daredevil, sorry, the Jessica Jones series on Netflix, she is in that, played by Rachel Taylor. She's Trish Walker. She's became Australian. Yeah, yeah. Amazing.

What an evolution. And what about the crosshatching, is it there? Yeah. No, she's blonde. There's no crosshatching of any kind. Goodman would be rolling. In his grave, I assume he's dead. I assume he's dead, yeah.

I hope he's dead. Yeah, so, like, so Stanley was... Got to turn on some people. With Jess not here, someone's got to hate people out of nowhere. And turn on the dead. That's her trademark. Hating on the dead. Punching people that can't fight back, or accountants.

Like Hitler. Like Hitler. She punches him all the time. Hadler! So, yeah, so romance in the 40s. Horror comics were big in the 50s. So, um... Oh, is this true?

that the Adams family started as a comic book? No, it's not. I do not have the answer to them. Your face says, your face says I said something stupid. No, my face says I don't know.

My face says I do not have the information available, so. Look, no, I'm embarrassed myself in front of the guys. You're right. They were a newspaper character strip, I think. Yeah. We could look that up later,

or somebody could email in and correct us, but I'm not going to read that. Okay. A horror, in the 50s, the Western came back, so they did Western comics for quite a while. The Raw-Hite Kid was a very popular Western character for Marvel

He came back As sort of a... He came back quite recently With a sort of a homerotic subtext It was a good, good fun series Through Marvel or fan fiction Through Marvel a few years ago Had a imprint called Max

Which was like Like, like, this ain't your daddy's Marvel comics It was kind of like a... Was that generally the tagline? Because that'd be amazing. Not really, no It was like it didn't Like it was kind of like

you know, all the safeties are off and they're swearing, they're sex and there's, you know, et cetera. But, you know, you said it was a fan fiction. Isn't that kind of what it's become anyway? Like, because it's, all these characters have been around for so long. And it's like kids who grew up with it, fans, ended up there, ended up just doing official fan fiction, a lot of it, right? That is in a lot of cases. Like, people who grew up as huge fans of these comic book characters, eventually, yeah, they got the writing skills, they got the artistic skills, and they're like, I want to work for Marvel or DC. A criticism that is often leveled at some writers especially in Marvel and DC at times is that they always want to keep this status quo, like certain characters never evolve.

Because a person's like, well, I grew up in the 80s and Green Lantern was like this. And so now, and they go to work for DC and the character moved on. And they're like, well, I'm going to bring him back to how he was in the 80s kind of thing. And so, you know, there's that kind of... It's just nostalgia. Yeah, it's nostalgia in a way. I kind of, I would prefer, you know, characters that keep evolving. But that's not going to happen.

Were these characters, the original characters evolving, like, is Captain America in the 50s becoming Western or doing, like, the erotic stuff? Are they, or are they staying true to superhero kind of stuff that we'd imagine? That's a very interesting question. Captain America didn't survive into the 50s. His last two, the last two issues of his comic were called Captain America's weird. Tales and Captain America was not in them. That's how weird it was.

They were just horror suspense comics. He was on the cover of issue 74, but he was not in the issue, and he was not at all on the cover of 75. Did that piss people off? I think, you know, nowadays I'm sure it would have, but... He was so popular that... Yeah, right? If he was popular enough, he would have been in him, I'm imagining.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, and also back in the day, comics were kind of disposable. Like now when you think, you know, action comics number one, speech, featuring Superman is worth a million dollars. That's because when it came out, everybody read it and just immediately threw it away or wrap the fish and chips up with it. And so, you know, in order of something to be collectible... Yeah.

There can't be many. Yeah, they have to throw it away. People have to devalue them. Yeah, exactly, yeah. It's called the trough of no value. I learned this recently. That not only does something have to have no value, it has to have so little value

that in, like, storing it in your house that is costing you money. Right. Because it's taking up the space of collection fridge magnets or whatever so you have to you just so it has to reach like negative value negative value yeah yeah and then eventually there's so

little of it and time passes that it becomes super valuable right exactly yeah but it also has to be something that people then care about again like there'd be a lot of things like that that no one even thinks about now right right right exactly fuck I fucking love this world but people have become so I'm a comic book kid that just never had a comic book I reckon

what did you collect though uh footy record Oh yeah still got great A couple of boxes of them The trough of No Valley was deep in that respect So

So basically The comics industry was in Kind of Through the 50s The comic industry was Kind of in a decline And it's only 20 years old Less than

Yeah yeah exactly Yeah it was It was up and down Yeah right What happened in the 50s There was a guy Called Frederick Wertham He was a psychiatrist

And he He read a book called Seduction of the Innocent And he sort of claimed that there was a rise in juvenile delinquency and homosexuality and other bad things of the time and he was like the reason for this is

popular media for kids and so it was like you're that weird tales edition of Captain America wow really set the kids on it chilling so there were there were a few there were quite a few you know there were a lot of examples in his book

it was kind of like the BuzzFeed list of its time like check this out here's a little bit of commentary check this out here's a little bit of commentary on it And some, there was a, there's a guy called, a publisher called Bill Gaines, and he created Mad Magazine, which, you know, still around today. But he also created, a lot, he published a lot of, like, comics like Tales from the Crypt, and these, like, horror comics and crime comics, and they were very lurid, and there was a lot of murder, and there was a lot of torture, and there was a lot of, you know, sexual attacks and all this sort of stuff. And, like,

you know, you could argue, you know, that's, that's not for kids. You shouldn't be just putting this on a, you know, and you stand for kids to grab and take away. But at the same time, a lot of his examples were like, here's a close-up of a character's armpit and it looks like a vagina. Like that's obviously the, like it's obviously, you know, this subliminal message to children to, you know, whatever.

And he was like, you know, really searching. Yeah, or like this is, you know, here's Robin from Batman and Robin and he's standing, you know, arms akimbo and his legs are spread apart and he's thrusting his crotch at the reader, you know, kind of thing. But, you know, as to say,

as if to say, take me. Yeah, exactly. Take me, reader. So basically, it's tough to, I mean, that certainly would have contributed to the client this book, this kind of this moral panic of, you have to, you know, your kids, you're ruining your kids live, they're becoming criminals because of, you know, all this. That's just been a thing forever though, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Every generation, it's video games now is what they say. Yes, exactly, yeah. It's just, you know, not to get political on this, but it's, you know, for parents, I guess you go, okay, I want the idea that there's an off switch, you know, you get rid of there. and then everything's going to be fine again.

Yeah. But it's not going to be fine. No. But anyway, basically what? Because of society. Yeah, right? Yeah, we need to turn society off. Do you reckon one day podcasts will become that?

No. Podcasts are ruining children's minds. They're staying in their rooms and the people who are making them are staying in their rooms. Maybe it'll just be a society where no one interacts except by a podcast anymore. So anyway, this resulted in something called the Comics Code Authority, which was this super limiting kind of. of this set of rules that you could not break. No armpits that look like vaginas.

No armpits that look like vaginas. Which is what I was looking at comics from the first place. I'm not interested anymore. Yeah, right? But it was this kind of like, it was very limiting, you know, so it was like no torture, no, you know, horrible mutilation or anything, which was fine. But then it was stuff like you could never end, you could never end an issue with, like, the bad guys ending up on top.

So you could never have, like, an issue that ended up a cliffhanger because it was always, because then the bad guys were the, winners kind of thing. You can never have a character in a position of authority who turned out to be bad. So you can never have a cop on the take. You can never have a corrupt politician. Well, that would be, you know, so unbelievable that kids... They wouldn't understand exactly.

Matt, can you even imagine a corrupt police officer, Matt? No, it's impossible. Look, I'm trying. I'm trying real hard. You're in your bloody early 30s and you can't do it. Imagine a 15-year-old kid. You're just a 16-year-old kid being the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. You can't understand it.

But it sort of went to the bizarre. It was like, okay, there's to be no mention of werewolves and ghouls and zombies and vampires. Normal wolves are fine, but were wolves? They're right out. I draw the line. Yeah. So, yeah, just, I guess just in case kids were like,

oh, I'd like to be a ghoul. I'd like to be a wolf. I'd kill myself and become a... Yeah. I'd like to be a ghoul. Yeah, right? I really like the idea of being a ghoul. Yeah.

I mean, eventually... When I grow up, I'd like to be a ghoul. Eventually, these rules were sort of... rescinded, um, or like, like, you know,

modified a little bit. I honestly think we should bring them back. Yeah, no, right. Now that would sort that Captain,

so, yep, Captain Batman versus Captain Superman. Right. Yeah. So, um,

like, you know, later Marvel Comics created like Blade the Vampire Hunter and the guys. Wesley Snipes? Wesley Snipes?

Exactly. They created Wesley Snipes? They created his career, certainly. And then they crushed it. He went to jail. But like, he did for tax evasion.

Yeah, for like five years for tax evasion. Did he do something else bad? Most celebs that get done for Tax Invasion. Five years for Passenger 57. Always bet on black. I only said because that's a thing. I know he did. But it was a good movie.

Yeah, definitely. He took him down. Demolition man, also great. Yeah, he did a lot of good stuff. I was going to say, so yeah, so they eventually rescinded it. But at the time, like, these were so stringent. So the guy who created a blade, It's a guy called Marv Wolfman, many years prior, like, during this comic book, during this comic code authority shenanigans.

Like, one time he submitted, like, a comic book to this authority, and they sent it back, and they're like, this is unusable, you can't. It was like some sort of tales of suspense, horror kind of thing. And they're like, and he's like, why can't use it? And they're like, title page, look at that. And... Armiped Vigano. Yeah, no, well, see, that's the thing. Like, he had wanted a, like, a credit, like, written by, you know, art by, et cetera, et cetera.

but his name his name's Marve Wolfman and his last name spelt Wolfman and so they're like you can't say Wolfman in a comic book so it was that it was that stringent

Is that his real name? Yeah it's Marve Wolfman Yeah That is That's one of the best things I've ever heard Yeah right No that's my real name

No it's not You're not allowed to use it So yeah So this Your name makes me think You're dangerous for the kids So in the 50s Comic Books got

they got less violent, but they certainly got we're like, we can't use the standard stuff we're going to have to think out of the box. And a lot of stuff was kind of, you know, good. You can find some good comic books from the 50s, you know. But there's just no real violence. Yeah, yeah. And superheroes were out. Yeah, I mean, they sort of towards the late 50s, DC sort of came back on the scene with,

they started again, they started a series called Showcase, and they brought back a new version of the Flats. They brought a new version of Green Lantern, and this was like the mid to late 1950s, and it sort of kicked off again. Where do you sit on the Green Lantern? See, I saw a cartoon with him during the week. And he just sort of like you had a ring on, and then he just like he wanted to get the bad guy, so his ring turned into a steam train. Correct.

And the steam train ran over the bad guy. Yep. And then Batman was there, and Batman was falling, so he, He got this, made his ring going on a green box. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I'm it. Oh. And then that turned into an elevator, and the elevator came up in the air,

just through the air, and went, ding, at the top of the building. Yeah. It was, you know. A little much, you're saying. Yeah, so, so explain that. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't enjoy him. What do you think about him? I, look, I have no objection to a character who can do anything.

Like, even, even, you know, a Superman from back in the day who could throw a planet about, as long as they're paired up with a villain. Who can do the same. Yeah, who can counteract them. Right. I like Greenland. I think he's an interesting character. Yeah, it's just...

I mean, it was a cartoon. I was about it's very cartoony. A little bit unrealistic. A bit far-fetched, thank you. Yeah. So basically it was, you know, 90, maybe, you know, the late 50s, early 60s. And so Martin Goodman, who owned timely comics, which, you know, he'd since re-named Marvel comics, he's like, all right, I'm this trend follower.

on this guy let's give superheroes a try again and so he got... I thought it's going to make the soup of Beatles or something because it's the 60s getting on the bandwagon I bet that happened

So what did he decide to do instead of Beatles Oh instead what he did is he went Okay Stanley, Jack Kirby you've got to put some together for us And this is where So Stanley and Jack Kirby

have been sort of lauded as this incredible team and they created amazing stuff But every time you like either of them did an interview about them creating these amazing characters. Their explanations of what happened are always completely, completely different. So, like, Jack Kirby had always said, so they're like, okay, you're going to come with this,

this amazing new idea. And Jack Kirby came in to, Jack Kirby, who'd left Marvel many years ago, but he was sort of working as a freelance basis. He'd be like, he's like, I kind of forgive you guys, I'll come back for a little bit, and I'll just see what I can come up with. So he comes in, like, the early 60s, and they're like, again, they're moving out furniture. They're like taking desks out. They're like, this is over. Wow, they really invest a lot in their furniture, don't they? Just solid gold gold. Solid gold. Quality antiques. Not emotionally, though,

because of the drop of the hat, they're selling it all. Right. Get it out. Yeah. So, so he says, he comes in and he sees Stanley, he's sitting on a chair, he's crying, he doesn't know what to do. He's, like, he's this kid and he's, you know, he's been in all these jobs to do, and he, you know, he can't save this company on his own kind of thing. And he goes up to Stanley and he says, says, okay, go to Martin, tell him, stop moving the furniture out, I'll do something, I'll see that the books make money. Like, I'll get this company back in the blacks, single-handedly kind of thing, right? And then he single-handedly creates the characters and the plot of the first issue of the Fantastic Four, like this. So he made all four of the characters?

According to him. But so, so Stan Lee has a completely different version of the story. Oh. Basically, he says that Martin, you know, Martin Goodman told him that he noticed that one of, uh, DC's comics had been selling really well, the Justice League of America, and it's a team of superheroes. And he's like, okay, if the Justice League is selling,

why don't we put out a team of superheroes? That sounds like Martin Goodman to me. Right, exactly, totally, right? Yeah. And so Stanley's like, well, I don't want to just create some swill, so I'll create a super team such as Comic Games has never known.

Like, that, he's the showman, right? And he's like, okay, their characters, they're fallible, they're feisty, they're,

they're colorful, they've got, you know, they're colorful, but they still have feet of clay, like they're these realistic kind of characters, right? And so according to him, he created the Fantastic Four Out of Nothing. Who do you believe?

Look, look, look. I mean, well, Stanley's always been the showman. He's been the P.T. Barnum, kind of of these characters always. And the thing that Marvel pioneered is this thing they call the Marvel method of creating stories. So, and this sort of came about because, again, Stanley was this one guy, he was this editor-in-chief at this company, and he's churning out these dozens of stories. And according to him, like somebody had come up to him and go, okay, I've got to write the new issue of this. What's the plot going to be? You know, I need the script.

And Stanley would just go, okay, just, okay, it's going to be this, it's going to be this villain, and he's going to be robbing a bank, and the good guys are going to come in and they, this is going to happen, and then, you know, they're going to stop him and put him in jazz. Okay, go draw it. Because that's the formula. That's the formula. Basically, so, you know, then the artist would just go away, and he would draw whatever he wanted, and then he'd give it back to Stanley, and Stanley would draw in some, write in some dialogue, and then that was the finished issue. And, like, this was very much a double-edged sword, because some artists were like,

okay, this is amazing. I don't have to look at a script and go, okay, page one, panel one, you see this guy, and then page one, panel two, you see, and he's looking out of window, and page one, panel three, blah, blah. You can just go, okay, I want to draw an amazing battle scene. I can do it in 10 panels. I can do it in 20 panels. I can do it in just one giant panel. I can do, you know, whatever I want.

But at the same time, in a way, the artist is also writing the story. And Stanley would always insist when he put out a series, that it would say written by Stanley and drawn by Steve Ditko or what have you. But in a lot of cases, it should have said written by Stanley and Steve Ditko, illustrated by Steve Ditko. And so... It does a bit like a... band making a film clip and then like a director and then going hey here's the music video and then

you're like all right i'll bust out some chords to it yeah right we're right trying to match to it and kind of just ask quickly before you do go on about uh jack kirby and stanley are either of them drawing the original they claim to create these characters are they fantastic artists themselves jack kirby's an amazing artist he he actually yeah he was this is what the thing looks like Yeah, absolutely. He, he, you know, came up with the designs for all these characters. Yeah, cool. He was, there was a, there was a editor of the X-Men called Louise Simonson in the 80s, and she described him as the Picasso of comic books, of American comic books.

Like, he's the, he's got this, it's a very specific style, it's very stylized. Like, it's not photorealistic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's got this amazing sort of dynamism, and it's got this, you know, this sense of movement, and it's real, it's real good guys. And what about, does Stan Lee draw? No, no, I mean They'll on earth a sketch From time to time

But he's not an artist No, he's an ideas man I don't know I feel like If I want to be Kirby sounds like the full package Right, right To me

But yeah so like But I mean never So that was sort of the We're talking about Fantastic Four But that was sort of the That was sort of the The way it went every time Like

They'd be You know Stanley had this charming account Of how he you know He come with These amazing colourful characters And we save the day kind of thing and Kirby's like, they wanted a character to do this, so I've made this kind of thing, right?

And it turned out in, I think maybe 2009, Jack Kirby's estate, his family said, look, he co-created all these characters. It's always said created by Stan Lee or what have you, but look, we need, we would like some of the money. You know, you've made a billion dollars off this kind of stuff. We would, you know, and there was a settlement out of court, so it's under terms of considered quite generous, but we don't know what they are. A couple of filing cabinets We believe

Now that he's dead And he can't get anything that he deserved We want it I don't know about that I feel like Stan Lee deserves it more than You who had nothing to do with it At least Stanley was in the building Yeah

But anyway so the Fantastic Ball hit the stands And it blew people away Again it was like Superman It's something they'd never seen before Because like... So Stanley was right Yeah So to you know

Prior to this when you thought of comic books. A lot of comic book characters were like, they were a millionaire playboy, and they just decided on a lark to become a superhero kind of thing. And they talked like people didn't talk, and they acted like people didn't act,

and that kind of thing. But sort of this was, these were kind of characters who, they talked like real people, and they quibble, you know, they quarreled amongst themselves. You know,

one month they'd be saving the earth from an alien invasion, and then the next month, they'd nearly be evicted from their house because they couldn't pay the rent. It was that kind of, you know, it was, you know, these amazing fantastical stories, but it was also kind of these relatable characters.

It's funny, because, you know, I think, because I've never read the comics and stuff, the way I understand all these characters is based on, like, how the movies have been perceived. So, to me, Fantastic Four are, like, a super lame thing. The Fantastic Four of all, the Fantastic Four in film have always been this bitter disappointment to me. Because it's such an amazing world

and it's such an iconic part of the mind, Marvel universe. Again, they kicked off this sort of incredible universe and every movie that has been produced has kind of been they've either been just okay or they've been atrocious. Like the last one,

directed by a guy called Josh Trank which was messed by the studios very significantly is just a train wreck. And there were a couple in the 2000s which were, they were fine, they were kind of dumb, but they were, you know, they were kind of fun.

And there was one in 1994, directed by Roger Corman, the famous B-movie director, that was never released because it's... I think I've seen a clip of it on YouTube or something, maybe, and it, yeah, it looked... Look, a lot of people have said... I thought there was a thing about whoever the studio is, needs to release it a certain amount of times to keep the license or something. Yeah, we'll probably get to that in a sec, but yeah, that Marvel have a history of, up until very recently,

giving away their characters for very unfavourable terms to them. Like again, it's this filing cabinet thing. It's to make a quick buck. They're like, okay, you can have the character, you can have it forever, just give us a little bit of money so we can stay afloat.

Oh, God. Anyway, so yeah, so the Fantastic Four really kicked things off. It really started like this movement happening. I think Stanley said at the time, before they did Fantastic Four, they might have gotten, you know, an issue got released, and they might have gotten a letter that said,

you know, I bought one of your comics and the staple came out, I want my dime back, kind of thing. And they'd take the letter and they'd put it up on the wall and go, fan mail kind of thing. But, you know, after this actual fan mail and people going, look, I really relate to this, you know, it's great. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

And so this kept... I can't wait for our hate mail to turn into fan mail. That'd be a great day. Anyway, so they kicked it off and it was just, you know, then after that it was, you know, Lee and Kirby and Steve Ditko, who created a whole bunch of just these amazing characters. So they, you know, Hulk, Thor, the Avengers, Ant Man. Spider-Man, that was Stanley and Steve Ditko. And again, this was kind of a revolutionary character

because, again, it's not a, he's not a millionaire, he's not a, you know, this idle playboy who just wants to, you know, have a bit of fun. He's a teenager, which up until this point, you wouldn't find a superhero who was a teenager. They were always the sidekick. But it was like, okay, he's a, hey teenagers, this is a character like you.

Who's, which, who's the teenager? Peter Parker, Spider-Man. Spider-Man's a teenager. Spider-Man. Spider-Man, exactly. Yeah. Spider adolescent He was this teen and he wasn't

He wasn't you know He wasn't again like a like a DC hero Kind of infallible character He was kind of he's kind of a jerk He uh in his initial appearance He um You know he shows off his powers on TV And he just blows off his admirers like

Who cares you kind of thing He lets a criminal just run past him Because he's like not my job to stop that guy kind of thing And that criminal later goes on to kill his uncle And then he realizes You know with great power comes great responsibility That kind of classic line Oh that's from

that's from Spider-Man. I think it's from something else originally, maybe some sort of philosopher, but most 99% of the population, including myself. Yeah, Peter Parker. I fully bought that it was just, oh, that's a Spider-Man. No, but it is, that's the lesson he learned.

And I think, you know, people really related to that, I think because he, even though he was this guy who climbed the walls and, you know, lift a truck or whatever, he couldn't, he had problems and that he just couldn't punch them away. And that's real people.

You can't just punch your problems away. Right. Yeah, and I've learned that the hard way. I haven't seen any spot. Spider-Man, so I don't know much about him. I just thought he was like... Yeah, I thought he was just the... Web slinging.

I didn't know he could lift cars. Oh, he's super strong. Yeah, right. So, and again, Spider-Man, the creation of Spider-Man is basically the most disputed story. Oh, no. Stanley, coming in and taking the role. Stanley's like, okay, you know, he saw a spider and he thought, all the amazing powers that, you know,

a man could have him who was given the gifts of the spider. Or he's like, oh, I thought, you know, I saw there was a pulp, you know, a pulp hero. called like the shadow called the spider and I remember him and then I'm like what would that look like in the modern era what kind of you know what kind of character would that be kind of thing but then Steve Ditko said in the past Stanley just came up with a name and every other aspect was him right so how about some sort of spider man right exactly and then everyone and Dick goes like oh right I'll make another one and the additional wrinkle is that

jack Kirby then said I know actually I came up with everything and I gave it to those two So it was me. It's incredible, but I believe that, because memory is so fallible, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's very possible that they all fully believe their memories. That's true. Well, they say, you know, the more you, if you keep telling a, maybe if you keep telling a lie, eventually you start believing that it's true, that maybe eventually they were like,

maybe they're like, I have to tell people I created, and eventually they're like, no, I did. Yeah, I did. I did. I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. And does they start claiming it once they start making lots of money? Is that often the way?

Or the way it worked back then is that you create the character and you just get paid a wage. Yeah, but back in the day, up until very recently, every kind of comic book creator, every publisher hired people work for hire. So if you created Spider-Man, whilst working for them. They own Spider-Man. You've got paid your day rate, you know, 50 bucks a day. Yeah, there's $50 for the day. But if we make $5 million next year, you don't get a cut. Well, exactly, yeah.

Shit. Yeah. So yeah, so, and again, there were so many of these, you know, they created this amazing universe and eventually Kirby quit again and he went to work for DC. And he immediately created a character called Funky Flashman who was a very, very thinly veiled version of Stan Lee, who was just this flashy businessman who never created anything and just rode on the coattails of other people and then he like, you know, he would trick the superhero. He wasn't a super-powered villain, but he would trick the heroes into, you know, making terrible mistakes kind of thing. Was he named Super?

That's great. Funky Flashman. How'd you forget that? That's the only thing I've written down. I thought they should be called Super Fungy Flashman in my mind. And all the readers are like, God, this sucks, but he's thinking, ha ha, ha, fucking Stan Lee.

That's right. But yeah, and so through the 60s and the 70s, I guess Marvel's greatest trick was this, well, the greatest innovation was probably the shared universe. On the one hand, it was great to have this amazing shared universe and all the characters could interact and they all lived in New York and they'd all have, you know, they'd clash and they'd be friends and et cetera, et cetera. But also at the same time, business-wise, it was amazing because if you wanted to know what had happened to this character before he encountered the other character, you'd have to read their book. Right. And then maybe they'd team up.

And if you loved Spider-Man and he was meeting the Fantastic Four, you'd have to read that issue of Fantastic Four that he was in. Otherwise, you wouldn't understand what happened in the next issue of Spider-Man. Right. Yeah, I think that's the thing that's got me into it. I love, like, I've only really got into any of this sort of stuff in the, like, leading up to the Avengers movies. You know, that whole series of Captain Americas and the Iron Man ones. I think it was one of the Iron Man ones that was the first thing that got me into, the whole comic book superhero thing. And that's what I, I think that's why I love it the most.

I don't think I've loved any of the movies really individually. I just love how they all come together. Yeah, yeah. So they all, in Marvel, they all live in New York City, which would be, which is a great idea for them. my guess, whereas you've got in DC, you've got someone in Gotham, the Batman. Correct. Over in Metropolis, you've got Superman, and then you've probably got other ones as well. You do.

Yeah, Don the Mariner. Interesting fact for you. The DC Universe Earth is slightly larger than the regular Earth. 5% larger. So the Marvel Universe Earth is the same size as our Earth, but DC Universe Earth is slightly larger because it contains all the regular cities plus additional fake cities. Right. So it contains Gotham and Metropolis and Opal City and Star City.

Are they in America? Oh no, they're all in America, yes. So if you're a citizen of Gotham, you are an American citizen? Yes. Oh, right. I just never, I just never thought about it. Yeah. I just assumed.

Yeah. Because it's got American accents and stuff. Cool, but back to Marvel. Oh, back to Marvel. So superheroes are back. Yeah, it feels like it's good time, bad time, good time, bad time. Yeah, it goes back to Marvel. Second and forth.

Cowboys and horror is out. It's right out again. Potentially illegal. Let me check my timeline. Time lines are very important in these cities. Let me see. In 1986, the company that owned Marvel was liquidated. It was sold to New World Pictures.

Again, that's Roger Corman's company. So the fame B-Movie director. I think that's how the whole Fantastic Four situation came about. So he owned Marvel for a while? He did, yeah. Or his company did it. And he still only did B-movies. Yeah, right, weird, huh?

Wow. But Super Hero movies weren't even big in the 80s. Yeah, there were a few attempts back in the day, but they never really amounted to anything. Was Batman the first big one? Yeah, I think it was. I mean, there was a few attempts. I mean, Superman had a pretty big.

Yeah, that's true, yeah. I mean, a lot of people look at those fondly. I don't care for them so much, but... Yeah, I find it boring. Just even... I haven't even been able to watch it. Yeah, in 1989, the company, was bought by Ronald Perilman

who he owned, he was an executive at Reveloan, the makeup company, but his company bought Marvel. Just what for fun? Well he bought it, I think he saw, there was a big boom in the late 80s, early 90s and comic books. People our age will probably remember there was like a big speculator boom because there were like these

there were these hot new creators of comic books. There were these new guys that names like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee, these guys who were kind of like these guys of the new Lee and Kirby. These are the guys... Tim Lee related to Stanley? Completely unrelated. Okay. So basically there was this era late 80s, early 90s

where there were these new guys and they, you know, they were amazing artists for their time, or they had like this very late 80s early 90s style that was, you know, very dynamic and was, you know, great for the time. And again, this was a point where, again, they were selling a million copies of everything. Wow.

It was a new issue of Spider-Man, this guy, Todd McFarlane, he was the artist on Amazing Spider-Man, and they gave and it was selling so well they gave him just his, just a new Spider-Man book was just called Spider-Man, like it was the definitive one, and it sold 1.3 million copies or something like that.

It was like this huge seller. And now 30,000 is huge. Yeah, yeah. We're approaching a crash. See if you see it coming. And so basically there were these amazing creators and people were like, oh, okay, so these guys are going to create the action

comics number one of the future. So we've got to get in here. We've got to get all their number ones and we'll hold on to these and we'll be millionaires Oh, so people started collecting them here. Yeah, it doesn't work like that guys. Yeah, people collected, they would collect one to, they'd collect one to read and one to save. Like one they'd read and one they'd put in like a plastic bag with a board in it and it would, you know, they'd put in a hermetically sealed vault and they'd be like, that's...

But then again, everybody failed to realize that if you're printing a million copy of it, then this timeline of when it's going to be worth something is going to go out to 100 years. Beyond your lifetime. Beyond your lifetime, exactly. And then these, again, these creators, yeah, they were huge. And so this guy, he spent $82 million on Marvel. So he bought Marvel for his company. The Revlon Man.

The Revlon Man. Man, he must be very rich. He's a very rich man. He's worth like $12 billion now, this guy. And he then took the idea of Marble. And he was like, okay, we're going to buy a trading card company, and we're going to buy a toy company, and we're going to buy like a sticker company.

We're going to buy, you know, we're going to buy these video game properties. We're going to buy all this sort of stuff. And he spent like $700 million on, you know, all this stuff for Marvel. Yeah. And then the stock prices went up for Marvel and he got out fairly quickly. Oh, we left. And I think he made $800 million on Marvel. And then people left to pick up the pieces because very quickly afterwards people were like,

again, people realized, oh, if we've got a million copies of that. this. It really got to wait for 900,000. He sounds kind of like an evil genius. An evil genius in a way, right?

Yeah. Sounds like a funky man, funky flash man. Yeah, a real funky flash man. Real, Joker. Yeah. And so, yeah, so...

Another bad guy from the, from the comic worlds. His trick was he basically went to his investors and he went, okay, so there are all these collectors out there and they're willing to pay more money and they're going to buy more product

because they're going to buy one to keep and one to read and blah, blah, blah. and we'll release an issue and it's sealed up and it's got a trading card in it and there's six different trading cards and so people would have to buy six but they have to buy 12 they have to buy at least six right

otherwise there's no guarantees right and so he's like okay we'll do that and then so the investors you know people invest it heavily because they're like oh yeah this guy's got this guy knows what he's talking about this guy knows what's up and then and he kept promising okay they'll buy more they'll buy more they'll buy more they'll buy more kind of thing and eventually...

Ruined it. Yeah, they eventually ruined it. People were like... Did people catch on? They were like, well, I don't want it by six... I'm the same comic. Yeah, but now, like, you know, there'd be an issue of Spider-Man and it had six different covers on it.

And you had to, you know, if you wanted to collect... And people were just like, well, I don't... I just want the story and I don't care about all these hologram covers and these metal foil covers and what have you. And eventually people just stopped buying. And so Marvel's in this situation where they were just producing a million copies of everything and getting hundreds of thousands of copies back because people weren't buying them.

And they'd built this distribution. network to put everything out there and they owned this toy biz, this toy company that were producing action figures that weren't selling or what have you and then it all just sort of came time. Marvel kind of took the comic book industry with it in a way like

because they had this distribution network that kind of collapsed and it's all. And so they ended up with a lot of debt and so in 1996 they filed for bankruptcy. So we're back at the start basically. So that's... Filing cabinet. So yeah. What a loose unit. But a bloody loose unit.

minute. Interestingly, the bankruptcy voided Stanley's contract with Marvel, and so he went back to negotiate with Marvel, and he actually said, okay, the contracting negotiated, I think it was secret for a long time, but he negotiated, he got $800,000 a year

just for being the figurehead of Marvel. He got, um, he got a pension for his wife of like maybe half that a year, and he also got 10% of profits from all their TV and movie projects. So that was his, well, see, here's the thing. So, um... See, that's worth like a lot more than 800,000 goals.

Right. So basically what happened from this point, again, this is 1990s, and again, they're selling the filing cabinets. Their stuff's going out the door. And so basically what happened is they went, okay, there are people sniffing at the door. We'll sell off some of our properties to movie companies. That's how we'll get some money back and we'll make money off. Merchandising, it's going to be great. So they started selling stuff off. They sold Blade, we mentioned before, to New Line cinema. And Blade, they made the movie with Wesley Snimes. That made sense. $70 million profit and Marvel got $25,000. Like that's there. Oh, Kirby's like sweet, two and a half grand.

I mean Lee, pardon me, Stan Lee. Just 10%. Quick note, Jack Kirby died in 1994. So did he die when they were back on top? Yeah, you know, well, no. So he went out going, good night. Yeah, I guess, I think he might have been just as they were hitting a nose dive, I think. And he's like, good.

Yeah, I imagine he would have been happy. Supposedly, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were at a comic convention in 1994 and they had a reconciliation. Is this according to Stanley? This is according to Stan Lee? It sounds like fan fiction. Yeah, so there's no other confirmation of that. So their idea was very bad with the Blade movie then?

Yes, and so they kept doing this. So they saw, again, they sold X-Men to Fox. They sold Fantastic Four. They sold off Spider-Man to Sony. And essentially what happened is they were making some bad decisions. And they also put in, there must have been some sort of perpetuity clause where if you keep making a movies, every couple of years, you get to retain ownership

of these properties. Which is why they made three Spider-Man movies, then there was a little break, then they made two more Spider-Man movies, and while they keep making X-Men movies, and they keep trying to make a Fantastic Four movie, even though they're terrible. And so they kept doing this,

and eventually... Give Fantastic Four back. You've had your chance. Yeah, I know. My dream is that they sell the rights back to Marvel, and every... Who can now afford it? Yeah, exactly.

And every year, Marvel makes one and they let the other guys make one as well. And so we get a really good one and we get a terrible one every year. That's kind of my dream. I would like to see that happen. I just want every... I feel like uncomfortable that Marvel doesn't have all their own things. It makes me feel gross.

You know, like... Right, right. Like it's needed to be complete and all... Yeah, I feel bad about it too. It just makes me feel awkward. And it also, they also, in a way at the time, they sold off their biggest... In a way, it's been kind of a positive. I mean, because they sold that to us.

Well, they sold off their A-list stuff. They sold off the X-Men. They sold off Spider-Man. And they went off and they did some, you know, they did some okay business. You know, some of the Spider-Man movies are super fun and what have you. But then they've had to go, well, we have to do this. Basically, what happened is there,

there's a guy called David Maisal, who was a talent agent. And he basically came up to them independently. And he was like, why are you doing this? Like, why are you, I have some connections. I will, like, you should make your, you should produce your own movies and get all the money. And I'll help you make that happen kind of thing. And the pitch was they went to a company called Merrill Lynch,

which is like a financial services company. And they basically said, we have all these, we're going to give you 10 comic book properties, like some of our great characters, and give us $500 million. We will make that money back and we'll give you that money with interest.

But if we don't, you can have these characters. Like, we will give up these characters forever kind of thing. Well, that's the collateral. Yeah, Captain America, they gave him, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant Man, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, a couple of others that, I guess, were thrown in just to see if anyone was paying attention.

PowerPack, Cloak and Dagger, and Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu. Exactly, nobody in Hoseyah. Right. That was, I think that was just the test. Actually, there's three posters on my wall, and one of them is Shang-Chi, the Kung Fu, Master. And PowerPack. Yeah. PowerPack, and then also Yellow Boy.

Yeah. And eventually, and so they... Kid. Yeah, and so for me, the good thing about this is they went, okay, well, what, we're going to put these characters up and we're going to, you know, we're going to front them and we're going to get this money and we're going to make some movies. And they were like, okay, what characters do we have Spider-Man, we don't have Spider-Man, we don't have X-Man. Right. What, can we get some B-list characters and bring him to the front maybe? And so they took, you know, Iron Man, who as a kid was my favorite character, but nobody ever.

Like when the Iron Man trailer came out, people were like, is this guy a robot? What's, what's this guy's deal? Who even knows kind of thing. Yeah, that's funny. And that made, they made $585 million. million so that immediately made them all their money back plus a little more yeah they created marvel studios which is their own producing company and they kind of so so captain america was already big but iron man wasn't correct um thor no not big as a mythological character sure yeah yeah but

not even though no no right yeah see i just assume they're always big so they're all that makes sense. So they were just like, oh, we do what we can with these guys. Yeah. And then I know that Guardians of the Galaxy was like something that I'd never heard of and I don't think like the layman would have known them. Yeah, I mean, that's a group of characters have been around for a very long time and it's sort of be list characters who exist off in space and yeah, I read about them at the time. There's like a few different formations of them. There was one in the 60s or something. Yeah, there was one in the 60s or something. Yeah, there was one in the 60s. There was a team set in the 30th century and there's some

modern era ones and sometimes they meet and sometimes they cross over and. and etc and yet's kind of a mess but they've really you know they've gotten people who love the form and love those characters

and trying to make the best characters they can and I think they've really they've really nailed it so you're like yeah maybe it's true that if they had all of their own characters initially yeah they wouldn't have worked for

yeah maybe it wouldn't have been as good yeah maybe yeah that's certainly that's certainly a thing how about what's the Hulk steel I was finally confusing there's many Hulk films sometimes two in the same year

from different like Eric Banner is one and then Edward Norton is the other next year. Are other than those Marvel made? Well, the Edward Norton one is from the current universe, I think? Yeah, that's, I mean, what they've done now is Marvel, again, pioneering the shared universe in the comic books, they then created a shared universe on screen,

which is, again, a very canny move, because you can watch them independently, but if you want to get the full picture, you do have to watch every single one, and then maybe buy them on DVD and watch them again before the next one comes out. Exactly, in that what they did is they created, they released Iron Man, and then they released the Incredible Hulk with Ed Norton

and at the end of that there was a post-credit sequence where Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man shows up at the end and he's like, hey look at this, we're all in the same universe, how about that kind of thing? And yeah, that kind of kicked it off again. So originally the plan for the Incredible Hulk was to have Mark Ruffalo, but then the studio insisted on Edward Norton and then Edward Norton was apparently such a pain to work with.

They got rid of him and he didn't want to come back anyway and so they were like, well, Ruffalo's in and now he's the Hulk. So yeah, the Eric Banner one was, unrelated. Yeah, that, yeah, they, they redid the origin and the Incredible Hulk, so it's, yeah, it's slightly different. You can include it if you want, you know. Okay. Yeah. I choose

not to. Okay, great. Goodbye, Bena. Yeah. I haven't seen that one. I don't find the, well, the Incredible Hulk's was definitely a bigish character, right? Yeah, oh, definitely, yeah. He was a, he had his own series and a TV series in the 60s. Yeah, with Bill Bix,

maybe not the 60s, the 80s. What's his, what's the main guys? Bill Bixby and Lou Forigno. Lou Forigno. He's still famous as the Hulk, I think. I've heard of him. Yes, he is. He's, he is.

He's, um... From time to time, he will be the voice of the Hulk in an animated series. He's the voice, I think, in the Avengers, the first Avengers movie. Isn't the voice just a lot of... He speaks every once in a while. Right. Hulk smash. Yeah, and when he does, they're like, get Louferigno in. Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, oh man, I want to know so many things. Uh-huh. It's question time. Here we go. End of one of the movies, there's the... Um, the duck. Howard the Duck.

Howard the Duck. Correct. Is that going to be a movie? Almost certainly no. They tried that in the 80s. There was a Howard the Duck movie. I saw it in the 80s, I reckon. What's Howard the Duck?

Howard the Duck is a, um, he's a humanoid duck. He's from a parallel universe. He knows quack foo, which is a form of martial arts. He wears a little suit in time. Oh man. He's kind of a, he's kind of a very easily angered Donald Duck style character. He's had some very good comic book. series, but

he's sort of considered box office poison because Stephen Spiel it was either Stephen Spielberg or George Lucas made a movie I think it was George Lucas made a movie in the 80s and it was just a weird looking duck

character and it was a very bizarre film like pluck a duck sort of thing kind of yeah like a real squat plucker duck and it was very it's a very odd movie now I reckon you know how these things come in peaks and troughs mortgage the house put it all on quack food

that's my that's what I'm taking away from this episode. I saw that, I reckon as a kid. I would have had absolutely zero idea that it was from a, like I would have added zero idea what Marvel was. Right, yeah. And only until really just then did I put that all together. I wasn't, so that was already part, that duck, it wasn't some weird joke.

That duck was from Marvel. Or it was a weird joke and it, but it is from Marvel. Yeah, he's been... What else I want to know, Dave? I want to know, everything. I want to know, does Stanley still get 10% of all the movies? No, here's the thing. in, I want to say, 2002,

Stanley realized that he wasn't being paid that 10% from his movie earnings, and he actually sued Marvel. And people refer to it, it's like Colonel Sanders suing KFC in a way, because he's the figurehead and he's suing his own company. But the head of Marvel is a guy called Ike Perlmutter, and he is notoriously cranky,

which is very diplomatic to say. and he doesn't like Stanley apparently. And so he's like, I don't understand why he gets paid every year for, you know, for doing nothing. I don't like him. He's, you know, I want him out of here kind of thing. And so he wasn't paying that 10%. And so Stanley sued Marvel. They settled out of court again.

Nobody knows the actual figure. But people, the assumption is that he got paid $10 million. And they said, but you're out. Like you can't, we're going to stop paying you. And you don't get the wage at all. You don't get the way. You don't get anything else. 10 million bucks and you're out.

Which in a way is still a lot of money. In a way, in a way. In a way, especially when at that time, what he's in his early 80s, and he's like, well, I probably won't be around that much longer. Right, right, yeah. Is there any chance they're going to bring everything back together? Bring all the, because they're, so there's Sony? Yep.

Fox. Fox and another one. Yeah, new line. There's been a couple of others. We have gotten a few characters back. So Daredevil was originally, I think Daredevil was given to Sony as well, and Electra, which is the spin-off from Daredevil, and they produce some terrible movies,

quite terrible movies, and they have been purchased back. So Daredevil got his own series on Netflix. The Punish it was purchased, he's come back as well. Spider-Man has come back for Civil War. So that's a very significant negotiation. A lot of people, some people are like, who cares if Spider-Man's in this?

And it's because he's a quintessential part of that universe, and he hasn't been able to be in what people consider the best version of this Marvel cinematic universe, and now he's back. so people are very excited. So Sony are like, just give us a bit of money? Yeah, we don't, again, we don't know the details and we don't know.

Is it a loner or? Yeah, they're going to do a Spider-Man solo movie. It's coming up soon. It's called Spider-Man Homecoming, and Sony are making it, but they are scripting it and producing it with Marvel's approval. Right, so it's in the universe, but Sony makes the money.

So you're still making it, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's complicated, but it's maybe a good compromise. I mean, and again, at this point, you know, the final business stroke here, I guess, is that Disney were bought, Marvel were purchased by Disney in 2009 for $4 billion. So now they have Disney behind them.

So ultimately at this point, I think if Disney wants a character back, they will just give whoever owns it a billion dollars and say, we'd like it back, please. Right. If they think it's worth it. So at this point, I don't know, like some characters are kind of poisonous.

Like the Fantastic Four, do they even want it back? You know, they might need 10 years. before people's, the memory of that, those characters are gone and they can give it another try. Yeah, it seems like a corny thing. Yeah. But what about the X-Men? Because that's a pretty successful cinematic universe as well. That's true.

And quite well-receives, too. Would you call it a universe? I mean, it's just one thing. I would call it a universe. I mean, there's a lot of spin-offs. And it's a very strange continuity in that they keep resetting time and they keep, you know, there'll be a character who's, a teenager in the 90s but then he's also a teenager in the 60s and there's it's very odd and but the I at this point the X-Men universe is kind of just

watch the movie and have fun with it we don't really care what the continuity is but yeah I think that one's gonna be that one seems quite tricky there's a there's a version there's characters in the Marvel universe called the Inhumans and they're kind of I think Marvel are building them up to be the equivalent of the X-Man in in the cinematic universe so if they can't get the X-Men, they're like, well, he's a, he's a backup. Right. These guys as a backup.

Because there's something about not being able to use mutants, right? Correct, yes. They are, like, whoever, whichever company that is, they bought mutants. They bought, yes, exactly, they did, yeah. So there's no way you could have Wolverine, but he's not a mutant or something? No, I don't. Otherwise, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't.

So that's a fun fact for you. That's a huge act. Wolverine was created by a guy called Lenween as a, villain for the Hulk. It was this period of time where the Hulk, they're just like, okay, create a, we need somebody to fight the Hulk, you know, this month,

and the next month, and the month after that. And they just were like, okay, create a throwaway character. And this guy, Lenweene created Wolverine. And then many years later, at a, I think it was one of the Wolverine, you know, premieres,

Len Ween was invited to, you know, that premiere. And Hugh Jackman said, this guy, it's Lenween, he created Wolverine. I owe my whole career to this guy. He's amazing. Take a bow.

Oh, everybody, you know, and everybody was like, woo, you know, this guy's the best. And later, Len Ween was like, or would I prefer to check, if I'm honest with you. Oh, weenie. Come on, come on, guys, you know. But I don't know. It's all a mystery.

All right. Okay, I probably should stop asking questions eventually. What about, but what about this? Yes. I, it sounds like you're about to pitch a comic idea. Here we go. What about this? All right, so it's a part human, part animal.

No mutants. Part inhuman. Oh, very good word. Good word. Part ghost, part funk man. Part Android. Part Android. Part Android.

He's part shadow. Yeah. You know how all the most famous characters all seem to have a huge history, right? They all go back to the 30s or the 40s or the 50s or something. Are there any iconic characters that have been invented in, say, our lifetimes, so since the 80s or 90s? Yeah, or there's no chance for new characters. What's interesting? Yeah, you're right, because there was this huge burst of creativity.

Yeah. But they were just rehashing the old characters. Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of the X-Men are modern created in the 80s. I guess there's a lot of more independent characters that, like, from like more indie creators that are probably, give me a second, I'm sure I can think of somebody. Because it's kind, I think it's just like everything is like all movies in general.

It's just like old ideas being redone. Correct. TV shows and everything. So I just, yeah, it feels like a new superhero character. it almost be like, well, that's just made up.

Give us a real one. Yeah, you give us a real one like the ones that were, we had when we're kids. Yeah, yeah.

So, but it'd be cool if they could figure out how to do that. Guys, I can't help you. I think it's... Well,

maybe, maybe one of our fans, Cecil is a, is a regular tweeter to us and he seems to know a bit about it. Just yelling at modern era

superheroes at us. I mean, there's a lot of... That's the catch. Yeah, no, see, that's the thing. Yeah,

exactly, He can't just be like, oh, how about that? No. Yeah, I mean, again, a lot, Marvel and DC are actually very good at introducing sort of more minor characters and superhero teams that do have a lot of appeal if you're any, you know, part of that, you know, you're a big fan of that universe already.

And maybe it will take, you know, them being pushed into a Marvel movie and, you know, that will be, then they'll become an A-list hero. But until then, you know, they're just kind of middling, you know, they're good characters, but they're not blockbusters. B players. Hmm. The B. What about that?

Is there such a character? Is there a Seinfeld movie? Yeah, that's right, yeah. The B-movie. Everything's been done. Everything's been done. Cool, well... Speaking of everything being done.

Well, this episode seems like it's pretty done. Thank you so much. We'll turn off the mics anyway. I'm going to keep asking questions all night long. Oh. And it's only 4pm, so... Yeah. It's a long night.

Thank you so much, Nick Mesao Mason. It's been a pleasure. For schooling. I knew, I don't know. I'm not that up to date. Yeah, I want to be. I don't know. I still don't know if you're up to date now.

Can I ask you bits and pieces? You obviously see the movies is the final question from me. Do you read comics? Not as much as I used to. Most of this knowledge has come from being a big fan of them in the 90s. Like it's, it's that knowledge that won't leave my brain. And in the 90s, would you go out and buy them from? Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah. And did you keep any of those for when the trough becomes so deep? Or so shallow? I do have a, I actually do have a spider. man number one. I do have the Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man number one. It's just the regular cover. It's not a fancy cover. It's bagged and boarded. What years is that from? I want to say 93. No-3, but this is one of the one million that were made at the time. Yeah, so I'm going to wait 200 years and assuming out all the other people have died.

And once the nuclear fallout has calmed down, the half-life of that. I am going to cash right in. But yeah, not so much anymore. I do like to get digital comics. You can just put them right on your iPad. That's good. Just to read. Yes. Not to take up space. Exactly. Apart from digital space. All right.

I've got a couple more questions. I'm ready. Sorry about this. This feels like good wrapping up ones though. Uh-huh. All right. So I reckon a lot of people listening probably don't know much about it. Uh-huh.

Like, kind of like me and Dave, who kind of do, but really don't. I think that's what the average person now, I reckon knows a little bit because the movies are so big. Mm. What is,

so your favorite character as a kid was Iron Man? He's a couple of parts, right? Yeah. Who's your favorite character now? Yep. All time. What's your favorite movie all time? And what would be your suggested movie to someone who hasn't seen anything?

What would be the best entry level? Good questions. Do you mean my favorite, when you say favorite character, do you mean just Marvel or anything? Marvel and everything. Oh, okay. It might still be Iron Man, because he's a real arrogant jerk, but he's gotten there on the grit. He's gotten there on the grit and his tenacity and his genius. his parents billions of dollars.

Yeah. So that's pretty good for him. My favorite character of all time is a DC character called Starman, who is a character from the, is a character from the 50s, but then his son took over the role. He was kind of a character. He wouldn't wear a costume, and he thought the whole thing was kind of dumb. Yeah.

And he would rather negotiate his way out of a fight than actually fight. And he was kind of, it wasn't quite an ironic take, but it was kind of like a, it was like a fan of comic books becoming a superhero kind of thing. And it was, I'm a big fan of it. And it had like, it was 80 issues long, and it had like a very defined beginning, middle, and end. So it was like this saga, and you read the whole thing, and it was finished, and it was real good. I recommend that.

Oh, man. You can track that down. I like the idea of something having a start and a finish. Right, exactly. It's so rare in the comic book world. My favorite, I think Civil War is actually very, very good. I'm a big fan of that one. If you want to see just one, Captain America, the Winter Soldier, which is the second Captain America movie, that's him in the modern era.

and it's a great a lot of the Marvel movies are there are genre film wrapped up like a superhero film because just a superhero film can be kind of boring like oh they have an origin and they find a villain and that's the end so you know they're they can be kung fu movies or they can be you know magic movies

or what have you and they've just got this superhero trapping but Captain America of the Winter Soldiers this espionage movie that is wrapped up like a superhero movie and it's very very good action's great it does have this super espionage style chain to it It feels like there was a movie in the 70s called Three Days of the Condor,

which had Robert Redford in it. This is this spy movie, and it has the feel very much like that, and also Robert Redford is in The Winter Soldier. So it's a, it's a real good film. So that's your best tip for a new players. If you're a newbie, yeah, check that one out. Awesome.

Thank you so much for coming in and being Jess Perkins. It's been a pleasure. Big shoes to Phil. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. As you know. Yeah. The deepest trough of all, am I right?

Oh, you're very yellow jumper to Phil. So yellow. Yellow. Yellow boy. Yellow boy. Yellow kid. Yellow kid. Yeah.

We brought it all the way around. Oh, we definitely did. Thank you very much. If we would like to hear more of your weekly musings on superheroes in the mic. Oh, you can listen to the weekly planet. Myself and my friend James do this podcast every week. And we're talking about the nerd news of the week. And then we'll pick some sort of topic or we'll watch a movie and we'll review it or we'll have a good old time.

We might do a superhero showdown where people will email in superheroes they want to fight. we all determined definitively who the winner is. Oh. I mean, not definitively, but we're not really that invested in it, if I'm honest with you. Who would win between Matt and I? Oh, oh, it's a good question. That's a good question. It would be a long and boring battle.

But I think, look, I think Matt is bigger, but I think just the fact that you ask the question would suggest that you have... A tendency for violence. You have the tendency to violence, you have the grit and determination. I think you might win. I think that's probably true. Mad you're getting... beaten in a fight by a man who weighs as much as who, Paris Hilton?

Is I weigh the same way as Paris Hilton, that's right? Imagine. Wow. Imagine. I can imagine it. Well, if you donate to this show, imagine no more. That's right. We will start a Kickstarter for Matt and I to fight to the death.

Thanks so much for listening, everyone. You can suggest a topic. Thank you very much to Pete. Yes. Suggesting this topic. Do go on pod at gmail.com if you're on the email. If you are on Facebook, we're at dot com slash do go on pod. And you can tweet us at do go on pod.

The hat is brimming with ideas. Love it. Yes. What's your Twitter again? You got a great Twitter. Oh, I'm at Wikipedia Brown, which is a sweet reference from the 80s that nobody gets anymore. Oh. Encyclopedia Brown.

Dave's got it. First one. Well done, Dave. Thank you. I'll win this fight overall. So, yeah, get in contact. Thanks so much for listening to the show. And we'll be back with the lovely.

trough filled shoes that is Jeff's, Jess, we'll be back. We'll be back with Jeff or Jess Perkins. We'll find someone if she doesn't make her back because she's such a comedy superstar these days. Thank you very much. And good night.

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