The Michael Knowles Show - Over $3 Million For Non-WOKE Comic Hero | Eric July

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Eric July joins the show to discuss how he broke the bank with the launch of Isom, His First Rippaverse Comics Book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Warner Brothers has a Batgirl movie coming out. Correction. Warner Brothers had a Bat Girl movie coming out. Warner Brothers spent $90 million so far on this Bat Girl movie, and the Bat Girl movie was going to be the first Warner Brothers movie with a transgender leading character. And now they're just going to shelve the movie, apparently destroy the footage. The actor, Ivory O'Reilly O'Reilly. Aquino just wrote an open Twitter thread to the head of Warner Brothers, said, Dear Mr. Zazlav, I just read an article on the Hollywood reporter about supposed funeral screenings of Batgirl and the possibility afterwards that the film footage would be destroyed. If this is the case, please, please reconsider this.

It's the movie is apparently so bad that not only are they willing to burn $90 million, they're going to burn the footage just so that it never gets out at all. to help me make sense of this is not only a really high-level, extremely insightful cultural critic, but also a comic book mogul himself, that would be Eric July. Eric, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you having me back, Michael. So, Eric, I want to get to you in just a second, because you, since we last spoke, you have become a major comic book mogul with millions and millions of dollars in non-woke comic book sales. So we'll get to that in a second. First, though, you've got to help me make sense of this.

I don't follow the comic book movies. I don't really follow comic books. I certainly don't follow the Warner Brothers' internal politics. So I didn't know that there was going to be this Batgirl movie. The trade papers are really whining about this. They say, Batgirl won't be released in cinemas or on HBO Max. The $19 million movie was reportedly close to completion when they decided to shelve it. and it features the DC Comics first transgender character.

Seems to me there's some correlation there. Am I correct? You are somewhat correct. So with a new transfer of power that we have over there at Warner's because AT&T sold off their entertainment assets, you have that Warner Discovery merger. New CEO has come in and those, that new team of leadership, they've axed and shelved a lot of different things. And one of those, of course, were bad girls.

And I think this is very significant mainly because, yeah, of course, nobody was really interested in. I don't know how they managed to spend $90 million on that in the first place. That, to me, is impressive. But nobody was really interested in this old race-swapped bad girl. It was very predictable. Of course, they always led with the social justice aspect of it, first this, first stat. Not really the content. But apparently it was so bad that they were willing to just take the tax right off of the $90 million and say,

Nobody needs to see that. That is significant because we've seen companies put out very bad material. But this, and we saw some leaks, not leaks, but, you know, onset footage, and it looked pretty bad. I mean, this had to be impressively bad. They were like, no, we put this out. We're going to tarnish our brand even more than what it already is. Let's make sure we put that on the shelf to where nobody can ever see it. That's pretty significant from a production company.

That's a great point because a lot of the comic book movies that have come out recently, they're not exactly Casablanca, okay? They're not the greatest movies. They're generally formulaic. There's a lot of the woke nonsense in there, which people don't like, but they want to see the good guy blow up the bad guy and smash up a city. So they'll go and see it. The threshold for the quality of movies is not all that high.

And yet apparently, Batgirl didn't even reach that very modest threshold. and they said it's better to write this off on our taxes and burn it than it would be to release it. That's huge. I don't know. I can't point to a time to where I've seen something like this happened where it was almost done. Like it wasn't like they were mid-production. Like it was basically done. The film was basically done and it was ready to be put out via HBO Max or whatever theater, wherever they were going to put it. And they just said, no, this can't see the light of day, get rid of that and get it out of my face. But I don't know, I'm not as willing to jump on like so many other folks are like, oh, this means there's going to be a change with DC Comics or Warner. I think this is more of the new leadership, not seeing really out of eye with the direction that the old leadership was going. They're probably going to still put out their own nonsense themselves, but it just didn't seem to make a lot of sense.

But it still is very significant for a company to invest that much in this product and just to say, nah, we just can't put it out. I'm thinking of the recent woke flops and even semi-woke flops where you come out with Lightyear. And Lightyear, they made a big deal about including a gay kissing scene. And they got rid of Tim Allen because Tim Allen, I guess is too conservative. And they release it and it's just a major disappointment at the box office. Every time that they try to remake a good movie and they say, okay, we're going to remake it, but here's the big splash. We're going to only use chicks. You know, that's going to be our really imaginative, creative decision.

We're going to replace all the men, the beloved male characters with women, and then they always flop, and no one ever really likes those movies. So is your contention that Hollywood is, they're not actually getting the message here. This is more of a kind of internal political power play.

Or do you think there's some hope that these executives are thinking, huh, I'd prefer not to keep losing hundreds of millions of dollars on this woke nonsense? I don't. I don't think that they're so ready to change, but I do think that there is, and I've made this point before, I think there's a big disconnect between a lot of, even leadership and the executives versus the people that are like on the ground or the actual creatives that are part of this,

then the ones that aren't really investing their own money into the project. I think that executives of major entertainment companies have been convinced that this was the way of the future. And if you looked at Twitter or you looked at TikTok, it may have seen. that way that this is what people, let's say, want it. But when it comes to customers actually spending their money and their dollars on certain things or viewing things, you're seeing that that's simply not the case, no matter how many retweets you get, no matter how many these weird stand accounts that get created, it doesn't really matter. They're not necessarily paying willing customers. So I do think that there's going to be a pivot at some point when people

continue to look at the bottom line of the executives doing. They're like, okay, guys, we're not making money. You see that? I don't know if you heard about like the C-EVILA. They got new ownership or something of that nature. And they just flat out admit it for a while now they've been operating at a loss. Like that kind of went under the radar. I was like, wow, that's pretty significant. Like that they were just making content and weren't, it wasn't that they weren't making profit. They were operating at a loss.

Wow. And I think as more companies start to do that, then you'll see a pivot. I just don't know if we're quite ready, which to me is a beautiful thing because that allows folks like myself and others to try to be competitors in this market. Well, you are, you are a competitor. I think you're probably more than a competitor. So since we last spoke, Eric, you, you are the owner of Ripaverse Publishing. You put out this non-woke comic book. And I thought, when I first saw the story, I said, Eric Jalai, man, that's cool, good for him. I hope he makes a couple bucks on that. That's a good effort. You know, me, I don't know anything about comics. Maybe I'll even buy a copy. Then I look down. You have made, if my

My numbers are correct here, Eric. I don't want to out you have people come hitting you up for cash. You have sold $3.5 million worth of comic books. The number I have in front of me is you've sold 50,000 copies pre-sold of your comic book. Yes, that is very true. 3.4 million. And that is still, I'm trying to get used to that because that's a big number. But I didn't expect it.

I expected it to be successful. Don't get me wrong, right? I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money to get this thing off the ground. But I thought of this 45 million different ways and I would have never came up with a way that I would, hey, I'm going to make three. I would have been like, no, there's no way that we do that. But man, for us to come out and do that to have over 40,000 purchases, over 50,000 total books. So to put that, like, comparably speaking, like looking at companies, if you look at like Comicron, they put out the data for, hey, Diamond, account of for this many in sales for the major publishers. The top selling graphic novel last year, like in Arjohn, the superhero graphic novel, was like I believe 24,000 copies. So to put that in perspective, we destroyed them by double their copies,

and this is our first book, right? This is a very significant thing. And I think that when I came out and said, hey, I'm trying to go out there and actually, I think we can make a splash. I think we can be very competitive in this market. I think people knew, it. But now that you see it, it's more tangible. And as these books start getting shipped out going

into September, it becomes more and more real that, holy crap, there's a big, like, demographic that wants this, but they're more so they're paying customers. Yeah, I didn't get access, the access media advanced copies. I didn't get the, I didn't get the coverage from the big comic book. In fact, the ones that did cover us were writing hit pieces about us. We didn't have any of that. We just did it organically. And we, again, accounted for more than 50,000. It just goes to show. It just how thriving this market can be if you simply just market it well and give people what they want. Who buys comic books? This is probably my own naivete. I don't know that I've ever read a complete comic book in my life. I've read parts of them. I've been given comic books. And I'm not saying I didn't

enjoy them. I just, in my mind, this was a really relatively small market. I didn't, I assumed it went woke, just like every other entertainment medium went woke. And then, so you come out there in not just saying we're going to be anti-woke. But in this, what I assumed was more of a niche market, and you just completely blow it up. So who are these customers? These are customers that I think have felt just disenfranchised with where entertainment in general is going. And I think it's just entertainment altogether. Some of its comic books, of course, a lot of our guys are former comic, considering that I've been a commentator in this space, a lot of the guys that like this material are going to be comic book guys. But we also

got new customers, people that just see the direction of where entertainment's going. You see what rings of power seems they're about to do with Toki and you see what's happened with Star Wars. You see basically every brand that a lot of us have grown up on has been ran into the absolute ground. So for someone to come by and say, look, I'm not really trying to beat anybody's head over with politics or anything, not even my own. You know what I mean? I just wanting to give people material that they can be entertained by, kind of get lost in. And yeah, it will expect. into other types of entertainment. We're starting with the books.

And these are just guys that, number one, have money, right? They're willing to spend, not just people retweet and stuff, people that are willing to spend money. But, I mean, just look around us and how everything's really going in the toilet as of recent. People want something different. And all I did was give them, granted, I spent a lot of money. I got the best artists that I possibly could.

And I made this presentable because it needed to be comparable. And they just came out in full support. And I think we're just really just getting started. Well, I like that point that you're making there because all the time people pitch me on ideas. They're always, you know, because the Daily Wire is promoting content. And so they'll say, hey, I've got an idea for it. I say, I'm going to stop you right there because I don't even want to hear the pitch because then I'm legally liable. So let's just stop it right there.

Do you have a product that you're offering me or do you have an idea? And they always say, well, I got an idea. I said, well, listen, man, I'm lousy with ideas. I have so many ideas pouring out of my head. That's not what we need. What we need is really strong execution. And so you put your money where your mouth is. You said, look, I got it a good idea for this comic book.

I got a good idea for where the marketplace is going to go. But it's not enough to just say, we're not woke. We're not the left or whatever. And maybe people give you a little bit of their money for that. But what you're saying is, no, no, we're going to make a very, very high quality product that happens to not be left. We're actually going to compete on the level with these guys and go toe to toe to and you win. Looking to see what's happening around your home? Rings battery doorbell helps you track packages and see who's at your door in real time.

The outdoor cam plus protects your yard at night with a wide field of view and clearer retinal 2K video. Or upgrade to 4K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision for ultra clear zoom in detail. Your door, your yard, your home. With Ring, it's protected. Shop cameras, doorbells, and more at ring.com now. That's the probably most important part of it. Like I put my money where my mouth was. I actually spent hundreds, a couple of hundred thousand dollars to just get the bad boy off the ground.

Paying my artist, Gabe El-Tayev, Cliff Richards, these are people that have been in the game, you know, for decades, you know, worked for the big guys, done that. You know, Gabe was being on Star Wars and Superman. And, you know, we basically went everywhere to try to find a group that we knew could make this, come to life, but also were just really good at what it was that they did. And this isn't my first creative project. And I like to think of myself as a decent writer, but we put that all together and we came up sort of with a game plan to, all right, let's make something that's first and foremost actually good. Right. So it doesn't matter, let's say, where this person is on the political spectrum. They see this cover, how are they going to feel about it? They start flipping through

the pages, how are they going to feel about it? I don't want it to feel cheap. I want it to feel like it's something worth investing your money in because I'm not old with these people's money. Yeah, if I led with that putting your point like I was, oh, I'm anti-wok or I'm, it's a non-woke. Yeah, I would have got a couple of guys that would align my pockets up. But the fact that we said, all right, here's the artwork. You know, here's, we've been very transparent about where it is that, how these numbers line up. We've been very transparent with, you know, give you the story. We give you the synopsis.

We give you the breakdown of that. We introduce you some new, new characters. of that and we did it all way put it on our own website right not having to go through a third party in order to do it kind of uh making it to to look like we needed it to look and people saw that finished product and say you know what i want to invest i want to pre-order i want to give it a shot and i think that's where a lot of creatives who are let's say more so closer to our line of thinking i think that's where they lose it people come into it like i have an idea that of this type of entertainment but they haven't even and actually made it come into fruition, to even present it as something that's worth buying into. And I wanted to make sure that we did that. And this is why we're able to get the pre-order out relatively quickly. It just launched last month. And it's going to be out going into September. So it aligned perfect. And I really took this serious. And I got the best in the business to work with me. Now, what makes it non-woke? Because the libs always come after us and they say, you use this word

woke and we said, well, actually, first of all, we got the word from you. You guys invented the word. We just kind of throw it back at you, now you're running away from it. But they say, you use this word woke, but what does it really mean? You know, it's this catch-all buzzword and it allows you to rally the troops. And I guess there's a point to that. So what would distinguish these comic books from, say, something that DC and Marvel's putting out? See, well, a lot of these guys, for one, they're not creative at all. Like, they come into it leading with their personal individual, let's say social political views. Let's say that. So when I think of wokeness, I look at a writer. I look at a person that is masquerading as a creative thinking that first and foremost is about

highlighting what I individually believe from a political or social, more so from a social view. And it doesn't even matter if it makes sense for that character that has already been long established. I am going to make sure I write that into it. So what they end up doing is, let's say, using these characters, Batman, some very prominent characters as a vehicle to basically spread whatever personal social views that it is that they have. And we're not talking about things such as like universal truths of good versus evil, which is really what the comic books had historically been about. So what I did was say, you know what? Everybody knows, well, I'm at, I'm about liberty, you know what I mean? But my idea of giving you a just a straight-up comic book

isn't to beat you over the head with everything it is that I individually believe in. I just want you to be, let's say, entertaining. Yeah, under like the great Stanley once said about social issues, he liked to put it underlaying the plot, not to where it felt like he was beating a reader over the head. Well, that's the complete opposite of what guys are doing right now. They are not only beating you over the head, they're telling you that you suck in the event that if you don't want to buy into this. Well, this is what's remarkable to me to see these massive companies. have people that represent them calling their fans actual paying customers racist or homophobic or

misogynistic, which is one of their favorite ones because, God forbid, you don't like a female character. See, I'm not interested in doing any of that. I think with these customers deserve some sort of respect because they don't have to invest in this. And I just want to entertain you. You're not going to just get an on-the-nose political narrative with these books or social political narrative with these books. I just wanted to give you good entertainment. I really like this distinction that you're making here, which is it's not, it doesn't make it woke necessarily if a character espouses some left-wing viewpoint. Because let's say you got some super lib character in the book, and that's, you know, one of the defining features of this character is he's a super lib. So then when he starts spouting lib nonsense, you would expect that. That would make sense.

But you're saying it's when it's when the lib nonsense comes completely. out of the blue, and especially with these characters who have long established, you know, roles and traits in our conscience, somewhat like Superman or Batman or whoever, when all of a sudden they start sounding like, you know, a 14-year-old girl on Tumblr in 2022, that, all of a sudden, you say, hold on, wait, that's not Superman. That's not Batman. That's you, the comic book maker, using my beloved character and taking this beautiful piece of intellectual property and just perverting it for your own stupid political ends. And we saw that, one of the big examples of that with Tim Drake, the Robin, in the Bat family,

where he just recently was turned gay, just to happen. I mean, we've seen it. It's visual. Like, we know that he's had girlfriends with, like, spoiler and these other characters. We know that's a thing and that's a part of him. Iceman, that was a huge deal when that happened with, because this guy was basically like a womanizer, if anything. And then out of nowhere, he's just gay.

And they, it's a form of gas. because they act like none of that material exists. But then you go look into like the actual, oftentimes, it's like a self-insert, right? It's a, this person was gay or this person had a close gay family member or something, and they wanted to make sure that they used his character to do that, which is why the writer, Tom Taylor, I believe is his name for that, like when Superman's son turned gay out of nowhere, that was the recent one, when that happened, I mean, the day that gets announced, he's doing interviews and he has that, you know,

the s on his chest and it's a rainbow. Like it's a rainbow S on his chest. And like, dude, you're telling me why you're doing this. That's exactly what you're, why you're doing this. You're letting us know. And that has turned so many people off to what's happening with the mainstream comic book industry, which is why we're thriving because I'm simply just promising. And we put out a public code of ethics.

I want people to hold me to. I'm promising like, hey, I'm not going to be beating my audience over the head. But these things that people care about more so from like the continuity. standpoint, whether that be with sexuality or anything, doesn't matter what it is. These are values with a company. And I want, when you get Isom, number one, you own a piece of history, not something that's going to get retcon out of existence because some writer just felt like, well, I want them to be gay out of nowhere or something weird like that. We're just not interested in doing that. I like that code of ethics. I like that promise. Because even this is getting really weird now,

even beyond comic books and the superhero movies, into James Bond, who's kind of a superhero, but he's kind of like a normal hero, superhero. And you're seeing a lot of continuity errors there as well and rebooting and restarting in ways that you hadn't seen before. And then, to your exact point, after this last James Bond movie, there was talk that the next James Bond would be a woman. And my first thought was, no, he won't because that wouldn't be James Bond. Because James Bond is a dude.

That's why his name is James. So you can have a spy lady movie, but that ain't going to be James Bond. But because they know that this content won't stand on its own, nobody's going to go see, you know, the brand new, here's your next double O agent, Spy Lady. No one's going to go see Spy Lady. So what they've got to do, or no one's going to go see, come see Super Gay Guy. No, no one's going to do that. So they've got to just take all the characters that you do like and then shoehorn their own agendas inside of that.

So on your on your code of ethics for the for the comic book beyond just you're not going to be super didactic. You're not going to cram stuff down people's throats. How does that even play on the on the rebooting and the timelines and the retconning? That's what the code of ethics is about. We had like three main points and it really doesn't even talk about like wokeness or anything. It's more of hey, continuity is what is a big thing. A big thing to turn me off from like modern comics was that look, man, we. have 16 reboots. There's 55 different versions of the same character. You don't know what universe

that. Oh, well, that's Batman, but it's not Earth. That's Earth 2 Batman or that's Earth 3. Like, you know, that's nonsense. And it really turns me, turn me off, certainly as a reader. I want to make it easy for people. So having, I talked about comprehensive timeline, but main thing, like limit, like the whole reboot thing, limiting all of that. Because again, I want people to get a book and they know years down the line, if we're still continuing to tell this story, those events happen. Those are things. that actually happen, it allows the reader to get invested. Like, why would I buy a DC book when I know two years from now they're going to have some catacalismic event and it's going to wipe everything that I just read to where it does not happen? Good luck. And I say this is one of the biggest Batman fans that exist. And I'm very knowledgeable on him.

I have to come up with a freaking diagram to try to make it make sense. When someone asked me, hey, I like Batman. I saw his movie. Where do I start? Oh, well, there's issue one. of Batman, but you don't want to go to that issue one is Detective Comics, but that's, you know, it got rebooted. And I have to try to explain this to them because they themselves have made a lot of continuity issues. So this is why I talk about like a lot of, this is my lifelong dream.

This was always my lifelong dream to do this. It just kind of got sped up considering my, my recent like success in other avenues. But there are other issues that were wrong with comics that also plague it, that yeah, they may use sometimes wholeness as a, as a way to kind of put this shoehorn and stuff in, but those aren't the only problems. We've found issues in distribution of comics from an economic perspective with a diamond basically in like two other public distribution houses that basically control the entire industry. That didn't make any sense to me. But there's all sorts of things wrong with comics. And I just want to, instead of always griping about the problem like I have been doing for so long, I want to be a part of the solution. That's great. I love that idea. And

even your observation on the rebooting, it kind of ties into the lib, woke view of the world, which is that history doesn't matter, tradition doesn't matter, the past is always bad, and then you can just remake the whole world anytime you want, whether that's, you know, through the communist revolution or whether it's by, I don't know, changing your pronouns and chopping off your body parts, that you can just constantly be remaking the world. And I wonder, there must be a relation there. And I love that you're saying, no, we're actually going to respect our readers. We're going to respect the characters. We respect the narrative.

And we're going to give you a high quality product. Eric, since I think there isn't nearly enough money, we've got to get you to $5 million or $6 million in sales. Where can people get the comic? You can go to ripaverse.com if you want to actually view, of course, the company and everything. It is that we're doing. The first book that you can pre-order still right now. There's 30 days left. to get in on the pre-order campaign.

Isom issue number one, I believe you guys are going to love it. It's about a character who, by the name, of course, Isom, that's a former hero name. He used to be a hero recently retired, and now there's this event that is going to be bringing him into the city that he likes to stay out of and everything kind of hits the fan from there. So you can read the entire synopsis breakdown kind of of the story, and there's so many different items that you can get on on the Isom issue. number one campaign. Just again, go visit ripaverse.com. You can get in. And like I said, fulfillment. It's about to start in the next couple of weeks going into September. So get in where

you can fit in. Get in while you still can. That's great. Eric, thank you so much for coming on. And congratulations on really sticking it to all the woke people and making a good product in the process. Appreciate you so much, brother.