Possum In Peril Ep 7! Tynion Time

After a surviving a startling courtship with CONTROVERSY, Possum and Peril are BACK to talk about comics the Neoliberal Media doesn’t want you to know about (queer comics for adults).

This week the clock strikes midnight because it’s TYNION TIME! Possum and Peril are talking about the homo horrors of James Tynion IV, feat. The Nice House On The Lake, Sandman: Nightmare Country, and Something Is Killing The Children (vol 1-3), as well as a special guest drag race number by Sins Of The Black Flamingo. 

Cameos from The Department Of Truth (which will get an episode once someone (Peril) finally reads it), I Hate This Place, Damn Them All, The Sandman: The Doll’s House, and more!

FOLLOW THE PERILOUS SOCIALS! linktr.ee/perildoom

Chapters

• 0:00 intro
• 15:45 Tynion Time!
• 18:28 Nice House On The Lake
• 37:16 Something Is Killing The Children
• 47:33 sins of the black flamingo
• 56:47 Sandman Universe Nightmare Country

Transcript

 . It's 2023. If you haven't sucked a dick, row the fuck up.

Like, I'm sorry, but like, everyone sucked a dick. You've sucked a dick. I've sucked a dick. Our grandmas have sucked dicks. Our grandfathers have sucked, Dick. It's like people suck dick in the trenches. It's an oral tradition. It's an oral tr I'm such a bitch. I love you, God dang.

    

 





 Hi everybody. Hello. I'm Peril. And I'm possum. And we are possum in peril. And it's been a long time since we've recorded and obviously, because I'm sure you've all followed the controversy around what happened. I know, I'm, I've been really scared to come here and talk 



about that. I it, it's, you know, it's been all over the internet and it's time for us to speak out.

What happened was not okay. Mm-hmm. I've come to recognize that and we both, we both care about accountability a lot. And so it's time, it's time for us to just, we're just gonna speak on it. And I think that, I think possum can really walk you through what happened. I personally take full responsibility as mother.

And I really regret everyone who was hurt. So possum, if you want to go ahead and let people know what happened, if they don't already know. Yeah, 

it was it was all over international news and all over your Twitter feeds, almost certainly, but to, to, to get into it without sounding like a fucking monster.

Y'all have heard of a friend of the pod Tom King, and we so Tom King heard our podcast and he thought, you know, what would be a really great idea, collaboration. So us and Tom King and several unnamed members of the CIA decided to do a coup in a, the small island nation of Lake Mo.

Lima, you say Leg my balls.

Damn. 

Did I, damn. Is that what happened? Yeah. You know, you were Lima, you were, you know, everyone was Lima ball. God damn. Woo woo. Okay, we'll see how that's, we 

planned all of that out. 

We wrote that. I was free basing You were, you were, you were 

free balling 

baby.

Yeah, that's, you were free basing. Yeah, that's what, that's a different thing. Those are the same thing, right? Free balling. Free basing. No, no, no. I, 

I'll I'll I know you're a hands on learner, so Yeah. So I'll, I'll shut You got a free base later? 

Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's, it's free balling heroin and free basing.

Jokes. Right. Okay. 

No one's free balling. Heroin. Heroin doesn't even exist anymore. 

I guess that is true. That we could spend a whole podcast just talking about That is what this 

podcast is about. It's about drug use, heavy drug use. Yeah. 

We, and Voting Blue, we got really into, Tom and I almost said Tom King again.

We all got really into Robert Evans book the, the History of Vice where he did every drug he could possibly figure out How to Do. Who? Robert Evans of Behind The Bastards. He wrote a book about doing every single drug he possibly could, including ones that like don't exist broadly anymore, and he would take them and then report on their effects.

Did he do heroin? Oh, heroin was the least of what he did. Like if you, I, I haven't read the whole book, but like he, he's trying everything he can possibly get his hands on. He's like trying like weird venom and shit like, To get high. That's neat. Like licking toads is like mid for like, from, from what my understanding 

is of where this goes.

Wow. We should follow, you know, we should follow in his footsteps. Yeah. I think uh, we should do every drug and read every book. Yeah. 

No, I, I, that's my life goal is kiss. Beautiful girls take a lot of drugs and read a lot of books. I'm like if Neil Gaiman's wrist was so limp he could check his own pulse, call me Nell Gay man.

Honestly, Neil gay man is probably, probably sucked a dick. 

Okay. Who hasn't sucked a dick? That should, that, that's like bottom of the barrel. That's like, that's like when we ask men to communicate their, their feelings. Like, that's like subterranean bar. It's 2023. If you haven't sucked a dick, row the fuck up.

Like, I'm sorry, but like, everyone sucked a dick. You've sucked a dick. I've sucked a dick. Our grandmas have sucked dicks. Our grandfathers have sucked, Dick. It's like people suck dick in the trenches. It's an oral tradition. It's an oral tr I'm such a bitch. I love you, God dang. It is a, it's an oral tradition amongst my peoples.

Okay, 

 So yeah, anyway, it has actually been a while since. Been able to sit down and do a cast a lot. March was a really intense month. 

Yeah. A lot of wild shit happening. 

Like we survived. Mm-hmm. Truly we did. A lot's happened. We've read so many books since then. We can't, I don't even think we can review all of them here today.

We're gonna like, touch on a lot of things probably. We're definitely gonna go really hard on Tinian. Yeah. This is a 

big James Tiny in episode. So if you're a, a tiny in head, like all of us here, a tiny onion, a tiny onion, if you will, then you're gonna have a good fucking time. And if you don't like James Tinian, then I don't know, go back to your Jeff John's books.

You fucking cowards. You can Lima, you can Lima balls and anywhere else you want to. I don't know. 

You just said that to a lot of people. 

As if I, at least eight people. At least eight whole, babe. My molecule is at least eight whole people, depending on how you want to count a poly keel. 

Neat. 



We've been bullshitting for some time. Is there 

anything we wanna touch on before we start talking about some of our books? How, what, what's been going on at the comic bookstore? 

don't feel like a ton of big comic book news at the store has been happening. I mean, free comic book days is coming up in about a month.

Oh, oh yeah. We just got in all those books. You know what we need to fucking talk about? You know what we need to talk about yeah, Dr. Mrs The Peril Doom is in a fucking book.

I am in a Bag. This bitch illustrated a goddamn book. She's in an anthology thrown together by Trina Robbins for Reproductive justice. So she's, she's in a reproductive justice anthology. She drew the issue, or the, the specific story written by Jessica Baloni, who is a former queen of the Escapist.

Yeah, just author of Banes, author of Ban Banes and Comic Stores Worldwide. Treasure of a Person. I mean, at least Nationwide. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. Jess Jessica Baloni approached me at the comic book store that we both work at, and she's like, Hey, I wanna be in this anthology. It's about reproductive justice.

It's, it it's actually a response to Roe v. Wade getting overturned. Last year, all these people came together and. Created a bunch of comics and Trina Robbins is the editor. She set this all up and she's created a book from everything we've created. I'm on page 43. Mm-hmm. Jess had written a story about her own experience with some stuff as a teenager.

And, you know, it's, it's a very powerful story. It's very honest. It's very strong. And I was so honored that she wanted me to illustrate it. I'm just like, this is a, this, this is an amazing story. Like, you, I can't believe I'm illustrating something like this. Like, I just, I don't know. I cried. I was just like, okay.

And then I, you, you are actually kind of around when I was working on it. Yeah, no, I remember you working on it. I was working on it so much. I just wanted it to be perfect and every time I bring in my drawings for Jess to look. She, she was just like floored by what I was showing her. Mm-hmm. And we submitted it and we got accepted.

I think we were one of the first ones to get accepted in and yeah. Very, very 

cool. It's an excellent story. I, I read it a, a, a couple, few months ago. Some sometime ago, you showed me it. And it's a really beautiful, really like yeah. Really fucking honest story. The kind of like honest storytelling that we really need.

And it's an extraordinary little anthology. I'm really excited to hold it in my gay little hands. And you can hold it in your gay little hands. It's on whatever this British Kickstarter thing is. What's it called? It's called Zup. Zup? Yeah. Zup. Yeah. Axil or John is also on there. Yeah. Zup. So it's on Zup.

We'll put the link in the description so that you can go donate to that 

and $25 gets you the book. We're trying to get at $8,500, I think we're at. Like 3,500 now, a little over 3,500, right? It's gonna have probably it's got like 25 more days on the Kickstarter. Or not a Kickstarter, a Zup. And yeah the link will probably be in the bio.

In the description. In the description. So, yeah. Keep your eyes loud on that. If you are a comic book retailer at all, or a bookstore at all there's an option on there. $75, we'll send you six books. So yeah, we're all really excited. I think once it gets fully funded and fully printed, we might Trina might be able to get us published through like Panto Graphics or, or I don't know, maybe a drawing a quarterly as well.

Yeah, I don't know. Could be either one of those. I think. I think it might get picked up by someone though. Yeah. Saint 

Fan to Graphics was interested. 

Yeah. I'm so excited. I'm so very, very, very excited. It's so cool to like, be published. It makes, makes me wanna make more comics. We should make some comments.

I know. We really need to, I am working really, really hard right now to create an art studio in my bedroom. If, if you're watching this, you can see all the lumber behind me that I'm collecting I'm gonna create this big loft, and I've got, I've got all these plans. So I'm really excited about that.

And yeah, that's something that's happening with me. And what else 

been going on? There was a crazy storm that knocked us out for, for, oh yeah, a few days. I lost power for 56 hours. The storm 

was shut down for like three days. Yeah. Storm 

was shut down for three days. Then my, then my husband had a birthday happy birthday to my wonderful husband.

Mm-hmm. Happy 

birthday. 

They're so wonderful. What else has, like, we, we read a lot of stuff. We have. Hung out a lot

yeah. And oh my God, the other day, this fucking man came into the bookstore and he wa he, he just wanted to buy stuff from like a different part of the store.

He was buying some, like postcards or something, like $2. Oh, this fucking guy. 

And 

 Basically, he was just like, Hey, I really wanna go check the upstairs. I want to check out all the vintage comics that you have here. And I was like, sure. Like, go for it. I'm gonna have to ask you to wear a mask.

And he was like, I'm gonna have to politely refuse 

that. Isn't it illegal to require that? Yeah. Isn't it a little draconian? We were d he called us Draconian This, draconian this, this motherfucker, this motherfucker walks up to two trannys during an age of like, Unprecedented, like legal violence, like on a, on a broad scale at least against like trans people walks up to us bitches and is like, isn't it a little draconian?

Isn't it a little illegal to require me to wear a mask? Like imagine having like absolutely no concept of like state violence or legal consequence that the most like draconian thing you can think of is two women asking you to wear a fucking mask. 

Yeah. It was so infuriating. I was like, oh my God, you're here.

You're buying $2 little postcards. I don't care about you. Mm-hmm. You're a gross looking man, and you're sitting here acting like I'm a cop. Like I'm telling you, this is where we wear masks in the store. That's our policy. And he is just like, that's illegal. 

And this guy was such a smarmy cunt about it, so smarmy.

He was just so, like, I, I just thought it's such 

a typical story, but like every time it happens, it just like, I'm just like, fuck off dude. Like. That's our so policy, like you wanna talk to my boss? You can talk to my boss. I don't give a fuck

he literally asked to speak to our manager like it was so bullshit.

Like gives a fuck what this man thinks. Like God. Incredible. 

So that was annoying. There's there's, there's an a. Yeah. You know, it's okay to, it's okay to hate the customer sometimes. Customer is always wrong. 

I think it's okay to hate the customer a lot of times. And I wanna be clear for if there's any customers listening to the podcast.

There's a lot of you. I really like, actually quite a few 

of you. If you're a customer and you know about this podcast, it's probably cuz we like you. Oh yeah, absolutely. We got business cards, actually. We got business cards. Oh my God. We've been handing business cards out to people. It's very cute. 

Yeah. Oh my god.

We honestly, we've just been handing it out to the gay customers. Yeah. Like any, anyone we know who's like, chill and cool. Like, I, I don't want to name them on stream, but like, The, the, the, the two sweetheart guys who like get a lot of tinny and stuff. Yeah. Or tiny and stuff. Absolute, absolute. Shout out to the two of you.

You two are great. Love having you in there. 

Well anything else you wanna talk about? 

I think we've covered our intro bases. We're gonna be cutting down on this anyway, so that was 

very silly intro.

Very silly intro. 

You know, this is also our first time doing the podcast not live. Mm-hmm. Like, we're not live right now. We're just kind of in my room recording this and. Yeah. I thought I figured we would try that. I figured like that. I think that would give us a different type of space to, to, I don't know.

Yeah. You know, like I feel a little less on stage. It gives me more room to like breathe and like, I feel like this is gonna allow us to like, take breaks and like 

Yeah. We can pause the recording, we can come back, we can like work through some thoughts if we need to. It's gonna, it's, it's not going to be as much of a live performance so that we can kind of edit a little bit more easily.

Yeah. And we're not having to deal with like interactions on the stream, which some of which have been really cool. Some of which have been somehow chasers finding our fucking streams. I don't know. 

Yeah. It's also doesn't really, I think like the last five streams we've done, nobody shows up. Nobody. Yeah.

Nobody at all. And I think that's, maybe because I'm doing it on Twitch, I need to be doing it on YouTube. Haven't really made that switch yet. Mm-hmm. Things have been so hectic. Yeah, 

it's been a crazy time. Like we just have not been able to stream for 10 million different reasons cuz there's always been something going on.

But we have so much to talk about now because we're still reading a bunch of books 

and like the Loony Tunes in 2005, we're back in action baby. That's a deep cut reference for all. You loony tune heads that 

don't look at me like that. Is that from the lunatics? No, that's when they were 

superheroes. No, no, no, no, no, no.

That was from the 2005 smash. Hit Loony Tunes back in action storing Brendan Frazier. Huh? They go to area 51 at one point. That's all really All all that I need. Wow. Add that to the list. Oh my God. Are we gonna watch the Looney Tunes back in action? Hell yeah. God damn it. Yeah. Brendan Frazier's in it. I, I don't remember much else.



Well let's just jump in, I think. Yeah. Okay. So I think we wanted to start out doing what I've written down as tiny in time because so much of what we want to talk about right now is just tiny in's, work tiny and is doing everything right now. Is doing nice House on the Lake, which is one of the best comic on shelves right now.

Mm-hmm. Is doing something that's killing the children. One of the best comics on shelves right now is doing Sandman Nightmare, CU Sandman, nightmare 

Country, sorry, Sandman Nightmare Country, which get, this is also one of the best books on the stands right now. On stands right now. And then we're not gonna talk about it today a ton.

It'll come up a little bit cuz we'll probably do a fuller episode on it once we've both read it. But my personal favorite, the Department of Truth, department of Truth, one of the best books on the stands right now. And actually I think the best thing Tinian. Writing right now, along with Sandman Nightmare 

Cunt.

Yeah, I haven't read it yet. I'm excited to get into it. I bought the first book, so I'm about to also wrote DC verse vampires. Oh, you did? Wait. Oh, you did? Now I didn't read it, but Tiny and also wrote DC verse Vampires. Oh, I thought you were saying you. Which everyone's always, everyone's had such good things to say about that.

I haven't gone in on it yet, but I want to. Book two came out this week. Mm-hmm. Hard cover, so I kinda wanna pick it up. Yeah. And then what else is Tiny Wind, which is one of my favorite series from last year and, and this year. Mm-hmm. Hopefully Book five or Book three comes out soon. What else is Tiny?

And Don? He 

didn't, he came up under Scott Snyder. He was like a practicing under Scott Snyder. So he started out doing like Batman Eternal when they were doing that. And then justice Lee Dark, which is how he met the nice house in the lake collaborator. Avaro Martinez Bueno. That's how they met, is they started collaborating on Justice League Dark, and then what Tiny and Tiny has done a bunch of other stuff, and I'm just like completely, he did the woods, he did the woods with I, God, I can't remember the illustrator's name, but yeah, that was a big boom book for a minute.

And, and some other stuff as well. Tiny's been working for a minute. He's, he's constantly doing stuff. He's putting out Blue Book right now, but that's not quite my, yeah. That, that feels like an appendix. Oh, I, I haven't read Blue Book. It feels like an appendix to 

Yeah. It's, it's not quite tiny end storytelling as much as it is like a descriptive account of events.

Yeah. 

Which is like pretty all right. But it's somebody who already kind of knows about a lot of these things. It doesn't do as much 

for me. Yeah. I picked up the first one. I didn't even read it. Neither did I. 

No. I'll probably end up coming around to it at some point just to, just because I, it's definitely a trade.

It's, yeah, it's a trade way. It's a trade. We're always waiting for trade around here. Mm-hmm. 

Especially me. 

Okay. Anyways, today we wanna talk about Nice House on the lake. I want to get into Nightmare Country and something is killing the children. I've read the first 15 books if something's killing the children. So I'm gonna talk about that. 

And I've read the first five. Yeah. I'm a little behind on something that's killing the children.

You know what it's about at least. Oh yeah, no, I read the first arc and, and at least have that basis to be able to talk about it with you. 

Okay. Well, yeah. So Nice House on the Lake written by James Tinian. The fourth. The fourth, yeah, I guess, yeah, the fourth. I never say that part. Art by. Avaro Martinez Buk.

And then I guess lettering 

is, oh, no, that's the, the colors is Jordy Belaire. The Letterer. Jordy Belaire. The Letterer is Oh, is and World Design. Okay. I know. And World Design's done other stuff, but it actually did some pretty good stuff on, on some nice house on the lake. 

Yeah. So Nice house on the lake, if you don't know, is a story about a bunch of people who are friends with the same guy.

His name is Walter. Walter. Walter grew up with some, some of these, it's like 

12 people. Yeah. 12 people. He went to high school with like three or four of them, and then he went to college with a bunch of other ones. Yeah. And like met one of them at a bar, like 

after that. Right. So all of these people who are, you know, they're all connected through Walter in some way.

They all get this email from Walter or they get a me, I think it's all email, emails or 

texts. Texts or calls 

or whatever. And it all says like, Hey, I have this. Nice house on the lake and next year I am going to invite all of you out. I want you to come stay, like make save the date, like make space for this.

Like it's the most beautiful place like ever, like come out. And it takes a lot of like strong arming, but Walter gets everybody eventually to come on out. Mm-hmm. And then this is all like book one basically. And the, the premise of the story is that they get to the nice house, they have a fucking blast.

It's so beautiful. It's so like modern and cool. And then one of 

them opens 

Twitter. One of the, yeah. One of them opened social media 

and they find out that the entire world is on fire. People's skin is melting off their bones, their eyes are boiling in their sockets. People are dying in ago. 

Yeah. And they think they all these news reports of just like pain and like literal, like horror, like the world is 

dying.

Yeah. And they find out pretty quickly that Walter's a fucking, some kind of extra dimensional being or alien. And it's, and he brought them here specifically in some attempt to save them. We will be coming back to that. . . And so the first six issues, they're like trying to figure out how to get out.

There's one person from this original group who isn't there, the painter Reginald Madison, who was friends with Walter in high school. Mm-hmm. They can't seem to find him. They eventually do. And so in response, Walter wipes their memories, puts Reginald back into the thing, takes Nora, this trans woman out will be coming back to that.

And instead of revealing who he is from the jump after wiping their memories, he just inserts himself into the group. Like in the first six issues, he stays outside of it. He, he reveals who he is, he stays outside of it. He tries to be relatively hands off. I feel like this is kind of a spoiler. I thought we were getting into spoilers.

I, I suppose, I mean, to really talk about, I mean, are 

we gonna like, detail everything that the book is about or are we gonna talk about like, like I'm like, I described like the premise of the book, but like that's like a midway like spoiler. 

Well, to talk about the, talk about part two at all, kind of necessitates knowing what happened in part one, I think.

Okay. Like, because part two is Walter attempting a do-over. And so to, so we can't, we can't really talk about the do-over without talking about the attempt in the first place. Okay. So I guess we will, you know, throw out a spoiler warning. Sorry, post a bunch of spoilers. But we are going to be getting into a lot of these books.

We won't be spoiling every single thing, but, you know midway, spoiler notice, 

I don't know. Yeah. Basically Walter is so powerful. Mm-hmm. And they, like Walter can Yeah. Rip their memories out. Walter can replace their memories. Walter has this ability where he makes sure that they can't get hurt and they all have these like, wild regenerative abilities.

At one point, someone like. Slashes their wrist with like a blade and it heals up instantly. And they, they try, they like stand up at dinner and they're like, watch this. And they're like, 

yeah, you gotta mutilate themselves at the dinner table. But then it heals up and everybody's freaking the fuck out. And, 

and eventually they find, they find guns and they start shooting each other just cuz they're all fucking invincible.

Mm-hmm. And it's just like, and and they're all freaking 

out. Yeah. Because they're stuck on, so, okay, so a couple things happens. One, everybody they've ever known and loved has died in a horrible agony. Two, their one mutual like friend here has turned out to be some kind of extra dimensional fucking freak who like is keeping them captive on in this like human zoo moment.

In this ba basically a human zoo. Yeah. Yeah. Like out of some weird savior complex. Well 

he's, he's admittedly part of an alien race that. Is taking over the planet. Yeah. 

Or wiping out the planet, something like that. And he 

basically got to choose all of his favorite people and now he's like collected them.

Mm-hmm. And they all know him so intimately, like a lot of them grew up with him. Yeah. Like, he's like a brother to a lot of them. And he's just like keeping them in this cage. Like literally, they'll walk out through the forest and they'll hit like an invisible wall, like they're in a cage. Yeah. A beautiful cage.

But they're in a cage, but they're in a fucking cage. Yeah. There's these bizarre sculptures everywhere. And there's this one sculpture where every time they lay their hand on it, they're shown visions of what is happening to their family and loved ones. Mm-hmm. And it's like they're melting, they're screaming, they're in agony.

They're dying. 

Yeah. Which I think was inserted in the do-over because Yeah. Cuz he tries to, he, 

he, oh my gosh. 

Really? I think it was in the do-over that he, he inserts that, that thing because the first time he's like, yeah, I, I. You know, they saw on Twitter what was happening. They saw these videos, but they didn't like, they believed me.

But it's one thing to like see it online and another thing to like experience it. Oh, is that what that was? Yeah. Oh, that 

makes so much more sense now. Yeah, because he is constantly trying to figure out how to do this the right way so that they like, trust him. 

Yeah. He's, he's effectively kind of rebooting them, or at least like in small bursts, he's like fucking with their memories.

And that becomes a big core of the book is like Walter's inability to like see pe like, to face consequences, but also to like see the people that he's fucking with fully as people. He kind of has this like savior complex and this kind of like, I don't want them to be mad at me, so I'm just going to like fix and tweak this over and over and over again.

Which becomes a big point in the, in the second book with, with Nora, who's a trans woman. Oh, Nora Nora's 

wonderful. Nora's a pretty cool character. Nora's a trans woman in this book. And we, we get to ha we get to see what it's like for when she's, she's like, she's growing up and when she's like coming out and like, we get to follow her story, she's written so well for a trans woman in comics.

Like she's not, she's not just like this annoying type of like trans woman character who's just there to, I don't know, build up other people's, like character growth or something. Yeah. Like at no point is it like in question is she a man or a woman? Like n we never have to deal with that bullshit with her.

Like she's written really, really 

smartly and if anything, she's kind of the most important character. Yeah. I really like that. She's one of, if not the most important character, 

like I can't, I really can't think of too many trans women in comics that I think are written very well at all. Yeah. And a lot of them is just such a crumb of representation that I end up like loving it.

Yeah. Because I'm just like, oh, I have this one. Representation of a trans woman. And she sucks, but I love her and I'm head canning her head, caning her into being everything I want her to be. But she, it's, it's never quite what you want it to be, but, but Nora is 

great and Nora's great, and like relatability is not my metric for enjoying or loving a character, but she is very relatable Yeah.

For many reasons. Up to and including the fact that she's a chain smoking writer. Yeah.  And also I just like to give you kind of a sense of her and also some of the arc of this book. Here's this, this, she's basically yelling at Walter at this point because she's been in imprisoned in like a mirror space.

So other people can't see her. And Walter's the only one who can access her at this point. And she, she yells at him. You can't just make people feel the way you want them to feel, Walter. You can't just decide that you are the good guy and then set the whole fucking world on fire. I know you, man. I know you're probably sitting there thinking about how you saved all of us and how it makes you a fucking hero.

This poor little alien weirdo who figured out a way to save his friends. Dude, you've been lying to us all. Lying to all of us for the, in the, for the entire time we've known you. Do you? Do you think we're just gonna be okay with that? Fuck. Fuck Walter. I was just getting my shit together. I finally transitioned and was becoming who I wanted to be, and you weren't a fucking part of that, and it fucking killed you that there was this big thing about me you didn't see coming.

Don't you get it, Walter? You never actually knew me. You just had a fucking version of me in your head that you wanted to exist. Well, I'm sorry. Norm wasn't real. He was made up. This is me and you have never fucking tried to get to know who I actually am. And do you know, have any idea how much that sucks?

How much that hurts, how much of our past that just erases And now you want credit for saving me? Are you fucking kidding me, Walter? Oh, she is. She's like the, she's the center of this book. It's so well 

written, 

so incredibly. I just love 

her like, and she's not perfect. She's not. An idol. She's not. She's just a, she's 

a real ass bitch.

She's a real ass bitch. And like something I don't wanna get into too hard cuz I, I don't want to get too into the weeds of this, like for spoilers, but like her, it's revealed that she and Reginald at different points in all of these reboots, because Walter's been fucking with them for long periods of time has been like, altering their memories.

There was a point in time in which Walter kind of talked her into helping with this plan before, like the plan actually like happened. Right. And you find out that like she was partially involved with like, designing the systems, like talking through the systems with Walter. You find out in other quote unquote reboots of their memories that other people have been involved with, with creating this process.

That like in different circumstances and in different environments and with different arguments, we can be convinced of things that we might otherwise not. Because in almost every other version of her memories, Nora is like, actually Walter, go fuck yourself. But in this one particular instance, I, during Reba, who knows when she actually 

like coaches him on how to change her mind.

Yeah. Like, because she decides that there's, there might be a better way to, to go about this. And she trains Walter on how to erase her mind, start her over and say the right things to her to get her to cooperate. Like that's a really crazy scene with Nora. 

That's a really crazy scene. Wal, Wal simultaneously being like bordered by scenes of her being like, you can't just reboot people and make them agree with you.

Yeah. Like, and so ultimately that's kind. What it comes back to what this whole book kind of comes back to is you get seen after seen after scene of people talking about either talking to Walter, directly talking to the audience, or talking to themselves, talking about how like, Walter has this complex, this like whole savior thing, but at the end of the day, like he wants control because he's scared and scared.

People can sometimes try to control other people to ease their ease, their own fear, ease, you know, cuz human relationships are messy and complicated and Walter just thinks he can fucking come in here and like Yeah. Control each and every aspect of it. It has, 

it has a sort of like white knight or like savior complex sort of Yeah.

Like story to it. Because I think throughout the book you really do get a sense that Walter. Feels guilty. Mm-hmm. Walter feels like he wished he didn't have to do this. He wishes that like his, his people didn't colonize the planet and kill everybody. Mm-hmm. You know, he, he feels like at, at some points he feels like people should be grateful to him that he decided to save them.

Yeah. That 

he would dane to keep them in a box. 

Yeah. And he feels a lot of guilt and, and pain and like, it, it really is a story of like an oppressor, like, I, I don't know. Trying to, trying to relate or something. Trying to be the good one. Yeah. And it, it, that just never works. Yeah. 

Trying to be the good oppressor and it's like he's 

an ally or something, 

you know?

Yeah. And it's about him slowly figuring that out through the process of like this little thing fucking up and not going the way he wants it to go. And him just rebooting people over and over and multiple people in different iterations of themselves telling him to go fuck himself. It eventually kind of clicks through.

Yeah. Yeah, I, it through it gets, it gets kind of muddy for me, like throughout the second part of the book. Cause I, I'm so lost in different timelines and different decisions. Are you getting made? Mm-hmm. They left it open to continue. 

Yeah. They left it open to continue. I'm not sure if they will. I think, I think they are going to return to it because of some of the implications Yeah.

Of, of the end of it. Cuz Walter basically. Actually, I don't know if I wanna spoil the, the complet. 

I think, I think we don't have to like describe what happens at the very end, other than it's very interesting. Mm-hmm. It's very interesting what they decide to do and yeah. The implications of it. It, it definitely spins everything in like a different direction and makes it all feel like a much larger story and it's really exciting.

Mm-hmm. And they could keep going with this story. I think it's been a really successful book. 

It's been a really, it, it won two Eisners in 2022. It won best new series and best writer. Yeah. So, and like the Eisner are hit or miss in terms of like, if they're right and I will see some of those Eisner nominations in hell.

But this one was correct. 

Definitely. This one was, everybody's been talking about it. 

Everyone's been talk, even straight people have liked this book. And since Wind of Straight people liked a book. At least 60, 70% gay 

people. Yeah. Like people, people know about Nice House on the Lake who don't even read books.

Like, who don't, I mean, who don't read comic books. At least like people know that it's happening. It's got that sort of quality. Yeah. 

It's, it's, it's not like it's breaking out, it's not saga big, but it is breaking out of containment. I think it could get bigger. It could get bigger, like especially if a te TV series happens and I think it will.

But then yeah, I think, I think maybe a good way to segue is to briefly talk about this thing that Tinian does, where Tinian has a self insert for himself in every one of his books. It's a little murkier in Department of Truth, but, and something is killing the children will come back to that, but the initial kid is modeled after him in Nice House on the Lake Walter is modeled after 

him.

Yeah, absolutely. That's, Walter is 

tiny and Walter is tiny and, and like tiny and has talked about how he has used. All of these, all of his horror books are like expressions of his own fears and insecurities and like, and things like that. And so he is, yeah. And so in, in Nice house, in the lake, it, it is really about his own, about his own insecurities.

It's about relating to other people and these impulses to like, fix things and always be kind of like, what is, what is really manipulation at the end of the day. Oh, like about multiple characters, masterful, manipulator. Yeah. The kind of, the kind of like, not manipulation because like you're, some, like Machiavelli like, or you're doing, you're, you're some like political power grabber, but like manipulation because you want people to like you and so you.

Twist things just a little bit. You twist the narrative, you twist how you're seen, you twist how other people relate to each other. You twist how people relate to themselves to kind of position you in the best way. And that's the kind of impulses that he seems to be grappling with here in himself. Cause he has talked about how yeah, all of these books are expressions of his personal fears in some way.

So I don't, you know, want to put all I I I, I don't wanna pretend I know exactly what the exact fear is there, but yeah. Walter is modeled after himself, or sorry, Walter is modeled after tiny. 

The book is very unapologetically, just really gay and trans. Really, really good. That's a big reason why I wanted to talk about it and, and keep reading it, because it's just like, the characters like are, are gay, are trans.

Mm-hmm. Not in a way that like, I, I don't like, it's not like they're trying to like, add diversity by a, by throwing in this character to like, Spice it up or something. Like they, they feel like real people. They feel like people Tinys met like tiny and himself is gay, knows how to write 

a homo. Yeah. He knows how to write a homo.

He's been doing this for a while. Like he, he wrote the PG 13 Constantine reboot when, when he came over to, to DC and he talked about how that was such a big thing for him. Cause Tinys like, yeah, I'm bi Like it was so important to me to be able to bright, like one of the first like majorly bi comic book characters in John Constantine that's likes so cool.

It's really cool and really sweet and like yeah. Nice house in the lake is hella queer. Something's killing the children, I think is pretty queer. Yeah. Like fucking department of Truth is, is is queer and Sandman Nightmare Hunt is very queer. So we're gonna jump into something is killing the Children.

James Tiny in the fourth art by Whether de Ladera colors, by Michel Muerto right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lettered by and world design again. Yeah. 

And world design seems to keep coming up 

and something is killing the children. I think is probably the thing people know tiny. And for the most right now, it's what, I think it's on number 30 at this point. It started coming out last 

year. It's, it came out a few years before that.

It came out like 20 did it? 18, 19. Oh yeah. It's, it's one of his longest running series. And it's also, yeah, one of his most popular. It's the one that I always see people reading and buying. It's probably his most approachable. I've only read the first, I 

think it's started in 2020. 

Really? I don't know.

Anyway, it's, it's, it's been going for a, a short little bit. So it's, it's been his longest running series I think right now. Besides the woods, it's the one that people know the best. It's the most accessible. 

Yeah. Something's killing the children. I think what people often ask is what's killing the children and it's monsters.

Monsters are killing the children, something's killing the children. What it necessarily is still very confusing to me. I'm 15 books in, I've read basically the first three trades, so I'm up to book book 

15, and I've only read the first trade some sometime ago. Actually, I think what was first coming out?

I was reading. 

Yeah, something Killing the Children is about a small town. I forget the name of the town, but in this town, children are being fucking 

slaughtered. Like they're getting like ripped in half and shit. 

Like what they show in these books is pretty alarming. Like they show, they do, they show children getting ripped in half like I do.

Maybe 

you don't see that in the first one, but No, no, no. You do, you do. You see some pretty graphic. I do find it very funny that like, this is the one, like if you look at the boom rating on the back, like the, it, it says 13 plus. Because there's just 

like, it's strong horror. 

It's, it's one of his most like directly violent books.

Like Nice House, like has like a little bit more sexual stuff and definitely more consistent swearing. But like, oh, I guess this one 

also got an Eisner. Oh, it got some not many, at least for best new series. Yeah. It's 

because tiny and fucking rips tiny. And is tiny and along with like Sea Spurrier and, and like Ali Wing are doing some of the best like books on the stands right now.

But anyway, 

not to interrupt you. No, no you're not. Yeah. Something killing the children. It follows this girl Erica, who is iconically, always just showing that one big green eye. She's just like me. For real. She seems to be a woman who as a child herself dealt with seeing these monsters. Mm-hmm. And losing her family to, and like the people around her to these monsters.

She has grown up to become one of these monster hunters. Mm-hmm. And she seems to be like a rogue sort of monster hunter. Yeah. She's like that, that comes from a world of monster hunters that don't approve the way she does things. Mm-hmm. So she rolls up to this town, the town's called Archer's Peak, and a lot of kids have died.

Nobody understands why. And, and the way that these monsters work is only the children can see them. 

Yeah. They're invisible to adults. Right. Adults can't 

see it. So the adults come up with all these like, like, oh, it must be a serial murderer. It must be some sort of drug that the children are doing, like they can't figure out.

And like in Archer's Peak, I believe in the first book, they discover a cave. Yeah. With just mangled bodies in it. Yeah. Just like 

dozens of mangled children's bodies cut in half eaten. Eviscerated and Yeah. One of, and, and the, in the intro to the first book. Yeah. It's like this, this stand-in for James Tinian, who is a kid, like, and his friends go out to the woods and then the, the friends get eviscerated.

But tiny in's stand 

in. Kid doesn't. Right. He doesn't, and he gets approached by Erica, who she basically needs his help to lure the monster back out so she can kill it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think that kid is gay. Oh yeah. No, 

that kid is queer. Yeah. That kid is 

gay. Yeah. He's kind of one of the main characters of the book.

In the beginning of book two, chapter six, he's like pretty out to his friends and one of his friends is also gay and they, you know, there's just gay characters. That's all I want you to know really. I like that there's gay. I just, gay people in horror makes so much sense to me. I think queer horror is a genre that doesn't get talked about enough, like, In most media.

Mm-hmm. And I think queer Horror is so untapped and so ripe and like we, it's, it's exciting to see it. Yeah. 

Literally the best horror shit that I have read in the last five, 10 years is pretty much universal or like near universally queer. I mean, we're talking about fucking like Gretchen Folker Martin's Manhunt.

We're talking about the works of Brian Ripley page. We're talking about the works of Andrew Joseph White. We're talking about the works of River Solomon with fucking Sorrow Land and fair New Book Model House, which I can't speak a ton on, but I'm getting to read a little bit early. Like you see this with Tiny's work.

You see this with fucking b r Yeager's work. Like the Queer Horror is just where it's at right now. Because honestly, if there are any csce people in the audience, y'all make this world a fucking nightmare for us. And I hope y'all repent before y'all burn in the hell of y'all's own decrepit psychology.

Anyway. Anyway, 

seconded. So yeah, we're following. We're following Erica. We're following her journey into defeating these monsters and we're finding the sinister ways that she sort of figures out how to kill these monsters. She's able to see them. Mm-hmm. One of the only adults who's able to see them. Yeah.

And where I'm at, I'm at book 15, like there's like this really big reveal that like maybe the children invent these monsters Oh, themselves. Which is like really, really fast. Like they're kind of hinting at that and it's like, really? I'm like, oh, like these kids are creating their own horrors. That only they can see.

They don't, I don't think they realize they're making it in the first book. Actually. There's this really mysterious thing that happens that they never touch on. They just touched on it in like book 15 finally. But there is this golden monster that is following her. You probably don't even remember. No, I, it's such a crazy remember scene.

I remember seeing that. I'm just like, who is this like golden goblin? That's like it. I think someone like enters the room and she's in there and it's her speaking to this like golden goblin creature and they're like, what was that? And she's like, it was nothing. And they don't, they don't touch on it at all.

I think they finally touch on it again here in volume three. Oh 

my god. Yeah. I completely did not remember that. You might 

like, maybe I can find a picture of it. Yeah, if you find 

a picture of it, I might remember it. I right. I Oh, that little bitch. Yeah, that little thing. Okay. I do vaguely remember that now.

Kind 

of like a, it's got like this sort of like freaky little goblin 

face. Is it the, is it the thing inside her squid doll? 

It's, yeah. Yeah. It's like inside the squid doll. Yeah. And, and she's always like, don't touch my squid doll. 

Yeah. Cuz like, there's a thing with the hunters, right? Where they have like these, like familiars almost, that are like demons or something trapped inside.

Yeah. And 

stuffed. The lore, the lore of something is killing the children is like going off. Ooh. Like it, I feel like it takes a long time because we're the first arc of this book. We're in Archer's Peak and we are trying to figure out what's killing the children, but we're slowly figuring out how these mons work mm-hmm.

Where they come from and the people who slay them, who is the house of Slaughter, which is where Erica was kind of like brought up, she was brought up in the house of Slaughter mm-hmm. As a child. And Yeah, she's basically run away from it. She's, she does things her own way. The House of Slaughter basically.

Does not give a fuck about killing children in order to kill the monsters. So they'll often kidnap kids, oh, use them as bait, bring out the monsters, kill all of the monsters and usually kill the child. But if they don't kill the child, the child will get raised over in the house of slaughter and become a monster hunter.

That's really interesting. You know, and Erica doesn't really like how things are done. I actually bought There is separately, 

there's a series. Yeah. They did a spinoff series called House of Slaughter. Yeah. So 

I actually bought book one and two of House of Slaughter. I haven't gotten into them yet. I believe House of Slaughter gets decidedly 

gayer.

Somehow. Yeah. And also the co-writer of House of Slaughter Tape Bramble is a non-binary queer person. No fucking way. No, they are. Yeah. They're a queer non-binary person. They, they, I think the first thing they did was are you, you, you remember Jeff La Ramirez's Black Hammer, right. That like Superhero Universe Lairs doing.

Right, right. Bramble was wrote on, was brought on as co-writer of the, basically there's like a Martian man Hunter standing in, in Blackham, and he's queer and there's like a, it's a whole big thing. They did a mini-series for, I, I can't remember what, what he's fucking called in, in, in in Blackham. But yeah, he's basically Martian man.

We'll call him The Martian. And he's queer. And Tate Bramble was brought onto co-write or maybe just write Wholesale, that mini series, that spinoff mini-series. And they've been working with Tiny and on House of Slaughter and also I think behold behemoth. Oh yeah. The one with Nick Robens. Right, right, right, right, right.

So they've been, they've been a breakout queer artist. Oh, that's cool. A writer in the last couple years. Cool. That's so cool. 

Yeah. I'm just like, I'm loving all these queer creators and queer artists that are like making comic books right now. We may or may not talk about it today, but I did read sins of the Black Flamingo Flamingo, and that was an all queer team creating a fairy gay book.

Very good. And I love 

it for that. I do love it for that. I, I do, I do love Sins of the Black Flamingo. I don't want to detract us or distract us too much from our, our, our tiny image. I d I did like Black Flamingo a lot, and I, I think some of the final pages of Black Flamingo really like some of the opening and some of the final pages on Black Flamingo really sold me, I think when, when writer Andrew Wheeler is willing to like, go a little bit off the rails and go a little bit like weirder with it.

Is when I really like it most. Mm-hmm. I think there are times when it leans a little too into like normative queer aesthetics and Oh, definitely. Like stuff that's like a little, yeah. And just like it's, it maybe, and maybe I'm just like spoiled on having been like a Hellblazer brat, you know, like brought up on Hellblazer and really liking like that kind of thing and seeing like some of the stuff that like se Spurrier's doing and Tiny End's doing.

I was a little disappointed it didn't go harder in some respects, but I do really like it and there's a lot of ideas in it that I really like. There's a lot of characters in it that I really like. I wish all of them didn't look like fucking like the Castro 

district. Yeah. No, it's, they're Tomma Finland characters straight up.

They're 

all 

Tomma Finland characters. And Tomma Finland is very Proto Castro clone. Yeah. You know, like that really set the stage for like the white. All taking on this similar aesthetic kind of a violent aesthetic that really excludes a lot of, like black and brown people, excludes a lot of like other types of queers, disabled bodies, trans people like mm-hmm.

It's just like, yes, like Tava Fillin really did set that stage. And this book literally, there's like a dream sequence where it is Tomma Finland. Yeah. They're all literally tomma. And if you don't know Tomma Finland, I dare you to Google it. Show it to 

your 

grandparents. Yeah. J it's just an artist that created a lot of queer erotica in like the sixties and seventies and eighties into the nineties.

I have this big book that I've had since I was a queer teen and like, it's hot. It's, it's fun. It's fun, it's fun, but you know, the problems are of it are, are clear anyways. 

And I think, I think the last thing, like I'll, I'll say on it is that the book simultaneously kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too a little bit, but I think.

Where like, it, it simultaneously is very much critiquing this to some degree where it's like with the, with the character of the Black Flamingo who is really cool. And I like the idea of this character of like, queer Gentleman Thief with like the, the, the, the weird mask and just like, I don't know, I, I really like the, that whole 

first chapter, he is just like robbing Nazis and shit.

That is dope. I do love the robbing Nazis and like how Jewish that book is. Yeah. Like there is something very Jewish about that book that I really like. And I, and I do like that the book kind of is attempting to take whatever Black Flamingo's real name is to account a little bit for kind of being like a selfish prick because he does, they do kind of like really embody that kind of like selfish, like white, cis, gay.

I mean, they're not cis, but like, I don't know. It's complicated. That's right. Because. 

Is they only say it on, like, they say it on like the first page. It's like, I'm non-binary. I use they pronouns. They don't really touch on it too much. Yeah. And the rest of the book feels very CI norm. Yeah. You know, like, it, like it's, it's not a part of the black flamingo's identity that really gets touched on ever again.

Yeah. And then they get wrapped up in all kinds of stuff with lots of cicis and Yeah. You know, 

it's very Castro clone, very Castro clone. But I, I do like that the book is like, kind of attempting to take him to task for that, like multiple char, particularly Ophelia, like, which it's a bit problematic in, of like, it's a bit of a problematic trope in of itself to like have this like problematic man and then have to like, bring in a black woman character to kind of just yell at him a little bit for being a selfish prick.

Yeah. Like it's, it's a bit of a trope, but like I do appreciate that they're at least attempting to reckon with that. And that is a little bit part of the narrative of like, Like, like, like what do you have to be nihilistic about? Like the black flamingo is like, so like, I don't believe in people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And maybe this world really should burn. And it's like, get the fuck outta here. Yeah. Goddamn Castro gay bitch. Like, don't even at me. Like, she's like really powerful 

too. And she's like, I am literally sent here to like, do so much good for this world and I can't because I have to keep fixing your 

bullshit.

Yeah. Yeah. There's that full scene fuck scene. Like I could have like That's a beautiful scene 

too. That is a beautiful scene calling upon all these like ancestral like figures and just like helping to like resurrect 

him and shit. Ugh. Yeah. And she's like, all right, you wanna get into the world sucks.

It's like the world sucks and this is the best we can do. This isn't, this isn't like, we haven't done anything to fix the world and it sucks. We have done all we can as like with our, with our magic and shit. And the world still sucks. You can't even imagine how bad it was before we came in and tried to fix shit.

Like, and now I have to like save your ass instead of like resurrecting James Baldwin or whatever. Like, it is, it is pretty, it is a pretty fun scene despite the trope. Like it is a pretty fun scene. Yeah. But I do like that the end of the book is like him kind of being like, yeah, you know, maybe I shouldn't be such a selfish prick and maybe I should kind of help people.

So I don't know. I'm, I'm curious enough to see where it goes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's, 

it, at the end of the book it was like, well, black of Flamingo will return. So I'm excited that it does, and I feel like not a lot, not a lot of people are talking about sins of the Black Flamingo. I think it was a real accomplishment.

Mm-hmm. Like, I think it's really beautifully drawn. I think it has really a strong understanding of its influences, and I think the story can go so many more places. And it's just this wonderful all queer team. Mm-hmm. Like coming together to create very, very gay content. Yeah. And I'm excited, I'm excited about that.

That's like why I wanna have this podcast is talk about stuff like that. Exactly. You know what I mean? And like that's, these are the voices that are so muffled in when it comes to talking about graphic novels and comics. Like we don't get to see like queer horror. We don't get to like see queer drama in a way that's written respectfully, in a way that's written real, in a way that's like not just a supporting character for some straight, cis person, you know?

Like Yeah. Like we are actually, it's so much, it's so much more interesting to me to see gay people with other gay people doing magic, like mm-hmm. Be being in a comic book, like dealing. Inter community, personal things. Like that's, that's where I exist. Same in my life. And that's what I want to see in comics.

Cuz that is just, it's just beautiful to me. 

It is just beautiful and so meaningful and like yeah, that I, one of the first like all queer teen, if not the fir, well probably not the first, but like one of, one of the big, like all queer teams in comics. Like one of the first like notably all queer teams. And that's really, do you have it?

Where is it? I do have it. Yeah. You get Andrew Wheeler, Travis Moore. Tamara Bon villain is a really cool trans woman who's been coloring comics for a really long time. Like she's done so many things. She's done everything from like Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur to Sins, the Black Flamingo to fucking, like, the 

colors in this book are stunning too.

Yeah, she's a's just stunning. She's a 

versatile colorist too. Like she uh, like her trademark is a bit the closer to like the moon girl devil dinosaur Kind of like Neni style that she has, but like, she, she's versatile. Like she does a lot of different color styles. She's definitely one of the, the best colors working right now and can do quite a lot of things.

And like, I think, I think some of the, I think she makes Travis Moore's, I, I think she's able to sell the horror of Travis Moore's work with her colors in a way. Like, there's like that bit where he's like seeing the world on, he's like seeing like the palaces of hell or whatever, and it's just like one panel, but like her colors on like that hellscape or whatever Yeah.

Is really fucking solid. Like her, her work is just extraordinary. Shout out 

to her. I think if you see sins of the Black Flamingo in your comic book store, I would, I would 

pick it up. Yeah. 

I, it's, it's gonna go places. It's, it's worth reading. It's words critiquing. It needs to be part of the conversation.

I, I think, 

I think so too. Also brief and I, I don't think anyone's talking about it. Not enough people are, and Oh yeah. Also a brief shout out to Adi Bik. Oh, right. Adi Bik, who is a really cool non-binary . We have talked about them on this show before. They are just fan fucking fantastic.

They, along with us on, are doing the best lettering and comics right now. They really are the heirs. Like what Todd Klein was doing back in like the Vertigo days and with Alan Moore. Like extraordinary. Yeah. Extraordinary stuff. Be gay. 

Do crime. Mm-hmm. 

Be gay. Do crime. That is, it is a big BK do crime book.

And do, do we wanna hit Sam Universe? I would love to talk about Nightmare Cup. Yeah. 

We really got in to send the Black Flamingo. It, it was, yeah, it made sense though. Cause I was just talking about queers in books and that one just was like, We both, we've both read it. 

So yeah, no, it worked really well.

Yeah. Let's talk about nightmare country. To get y'all back into the swing of things real briefly, there's an introduction in the beginning of this book where Tinian talks about that Sandman is the reason he writes comics. And like, it was like one of the biggest inspirations for him. So this is him like coming kind of full circle in a way to really get into.

It's a beautiful fucking book. These are the direct market hard covers. We both got the hard covers. The hard covers are so beautiful and the soft covers are pretty beautiful too. I like the American flag, like Covid mask and like the, he's like toing his own eye. They're always 

What, what's his character's name?

The Corinthian. The Corinthian who has mouths for eyes. They're like, is just on full display in most of the in most of the covers. And who is doing these covers? Because they're just 

stunning. The cover, the cover to this hard cover is the same guy Reko Murakami, who is doing, who did a, a bunch of the covers for Sandman Dead Boy Detectives, I think.

Oh right, right, right. Or at least he's done covers for them. Incredible work. See a Sandman Nightmare Country. Just throw this out there, written by James Tinian with Art by Alessandro Esther, who you might know from regarding the matter of Oswald's Body that he did with Christopher Cantwell. He did lost Soldiers with Ali Kott, which is an incredible fucking book if you like, like Garth Dennis's, kind of like Punisher Max stuff or any of the, like, more serious Garth Enes stuff.

It's really good. It's really fucking bleak. Wait, which one law Soldiers was one of the first things, the song you told me about. Law Soldiers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fucking incredible. It's like Cormack McCarthy's Punisher Max. It's bleak as fuck, like it's legitimately harrowing. But really good book.

Yeah, anyway, he's done, he's done a, he's done a few different things. He's really been popping off. Wait, who are you talking? Sorry? LaSandra S LaSandra. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. With these interludes done by there's, there's interludes once per chapter. There's six issues so far. By Yannick Paque who you might know from like a bunch of Wonder Woman covers.

Andreas Orino, who has done a bunch of work with Jeff Lair on like horror series like Gideon Falls and primordial and did a bunch of other stuff. Francesco Franci, who's like one of the most famous people on this list. He's, he's done a fucking ton of stuff. If you've read any like Batman things, any noir, puy things, he's been doing art for that for a while.

He's fucking phenomenal. He's fantastic. Night of the Ghoul Batman Black Mirror. Danny does some art, which if you're familiar with her work, she did coffin Bound. One of my other favorite very queer comics, like of all time last like 10, 15 years. And then Aaron and Campbell, who did all a bunch of the art.

It was one of the two regular artists for Seis, Spurrier's, Hellblazer Run. Aaron Campbell, also banks. Just in Incre, like an incredible murders Rose Row of Artis. And then Maria Lavette does the final chapter. She did a bunch of work. She's like done a bunch of like independent like comics by herself.

She has also done the Faithless comics with Brian Azzarello. I am a noted Brian Azzarello hater, so I haven't read them however I might have to because there's like a whole penis or a Boros thing that happens. Yeah. That does it for you. And Faithless in faceless. In Faithless three, I think there was like a scene I just like flipped open the book in stores and like they start like sucking and fucking each other and it turns into like, like a three-way aura.

Boros. Hell yeah. It's really hot. They like start like unmaking each other's flesh. And I was like, damn. Asar relo. When Azzarello stops being a weird racist for a few seconds, like he can occasionally do interesting things. Sorry, I'm a bit of an azzarello hater. Fuck you buddy. I 

feel like this Sandman series 

is a little under the radar. It's incredibly under the fucking radar, 

and it was definitely under the radar for me. Possum just started talking about it a couple weeks ago and I was like, oh, that is tiny. And I forgot. I'm reading like all tiny in right now, so I actually need to get on this.

I am not someone who has read all the Sandman books. I'm, you know, I'm a good, good way through the, that little collection that recently came out when the show started dropping that, that number one Oh yeah. Collection that like paperback it's, it's an amazing book. I've, you know, but I'm not like fully into Sandman and this, this still made a lot of sense to.

Yeah, like they do a really good job at like bringing you into the universe, understanding who these characters are, what their jobs are, you, you know, like if you understand who death is, if you understand who dream is mm-hmm. Then you're kind of have no problem getting into this Sandman book. 

There, there is some, some context that's not necessary, but I do think is very interesting given our, our conversation is that Sandman was like a really big queer comic in a lot of ways.

Despite, you know, Neil Gaiman being, I don't know, probably sucked to Dick in his time, but like, anyway, boy being like, there's a ton of bi characters in it and it was one of the first like big comics to have so many pie characters. There's also some problems in there. There's like, there's like a major trans woman introduced who's really cool, but then also there's like this turf witch and it's like unclear how much Gaiman was like.

Anyway, the point being the Corinthian is a very interesting character because in the original. Comics. His shtick was that he's queer, but his thing is kidnapping gay people and like torturing them in ways that like, they never say like, rape is a part of it, but like it's kind of implied. Or at least it like feels very like violent.

And so it's like this, like queer, this queer serial killer who prays another queer people. The thing about it is that the Corinthian gets unmade in the beginning of Sandman and, and like the second arc at the serial killer convention, which is referenced in this book with the, the, the Danny Sequences chased where they torture that guy who runs the snuff magazines.

Right, right, right. And also issue six with Aaron Campbell's stuff. When Dr. When he's like up on the podium screaming, right, he gets un. But then he gets remade again, like a new version of the Corinthian gets made towards the end of the series. And so this is that Corinthian, okay. This is the remade one.

This is the one who didn't go off the rails and was, because when Dream got imprisoned, Corinthian was like, oh, cool, I can just go into the human world and start praying on gay people and, and being like a serial killer. So that one gets unmade and destroyed. Oh, this Corinthian is actually technically the second one.

I see. And that's why he's remembering things like, again, it's not super important to like get what's going on, but that's why in the, or in the beginning he, he's like talking about remembering things. Right. And savoring the delicious memories because those memories aren't really his, but they're, yeah.

They show, they show some of the memories. Yeah. And that's what they're 

referring to. He's just like, yeah, he's sort of reliving them. He's sort of just. Yeah. Almost eating them. 

Yeah. He's like eating people's terror because that's really what his thing is. Like he eats people's eyes, but he's also eating their terror.

He's a nightmare. And he has a function within the dreaming, which is like the system that allows, like it's, it's government's not the right word. It's like the, it's like the system that facilitates and fosters human dreams and also the dreams of all other beings, like all sentient life. Anything that can possibly dream comes through the dreaming.

And so nightmares serve their own function in there. And what the problem was, was that he got out and was just like terrorizing people. Right. So this is about the second version of him kind of coming back out. Anyway, let's, let's, let's get more into the, the actual plot of this one. That context went a little longer than I meant it too.

No, I mean, I appreciate it. As someone who's not fully in on night to Sandman. 

Oh yeah, Sandman Sandman was huge for me. Like I ba for, for, for most comic 

book greeters, like Sandman is referenced. Sorry about that. Sandman is referenced as very important book. It like Broke Barriers. It got a lot of people in the comic books who weren't really into comic books before.

It still talked about to this day. There's a Netflix series now that's like really, really 

good. And there's these and, and there's this like revamp set of series. Like where you get Dan Waters, Lucifer, you get Nightmare Country, you get fucking friend of the pod, porns, sec Pisha Schultz dead Boy Detectives.

Like, it's, it's a really fertile universe and one of the only ones in, in kind of big mainstream comics that's worth coming back to cuz there's really infinite possibilities here. And the Sandman universe absolutely demonstrates that. 

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You know, you could also wipe rainbow capitalists on both sides. I can't even pretend to do this bit anymore. Fuck the fuck you rainbow capitalist you pieces of shit.

You fucking traitors. You Roy COEs bitches like, don't even talk to me. The world is burning and they're trying to exterminate us. And you wanna like cozy up to capital, like, get the fuck out of my face. Welcome 

to possum and peril where we couldn't sell out even if we tried, based on everything we've ever said up until now, where we are definitely gonna clean up our act.

The police, like that one episode of SpongeBob, like, jot that down, jot that down.

Oh 

my. Have I sat, have I, have we ever really let everyone know how much money we make off this podcast because it's, it's, we're in the hole. 

Yeah. On, on a good day, I could buy a stick of gum from one of those bougie stores that sells gum for like three fucking dollars. Delicious. You ever tried to buy gum with PayPal?



 I don't pay for gum. Okay. Yeah. I steal 

it. Yeah. You just get girls to spit it in your mouth. And I mean, a girl, I don't know who she'd be, but you're gay. You're fucking gay. Anyway, okay, so we started 

describing the James Tinian book the Sandman Universe, nightmare Country, which just came out in a hard cover and a soft cover, and we decided we kind of wanted to start over.

Yes, and I would like to briefly issue a correction. I fucked up on, I was, I mixed up two artists.

We Googled it, Lassandro Estrin did redneck with Donnie Kate's and Strange Skies over East Berlin with Christopher Cantwell, not regarding the matter of Oswald's Body with Christopher Cantwell, that was Luca, I'm forgetting the last name. He also did Lost Soldiers with Ali Kot, which as I mentioned earlier, really fucking good.

Go read it. If you have a stomach for just like absolutely like Cormack McCarthy, levels of fucking bleak about how much the state sucks. Like it's really good. 

As reporters, I think it's important for us to have integrity and so we issue this apology to be accountable. Yeah, much like we were at the beginning of the podcast, 

I believe in accountability so much that I believe in laying the truth Bear, which is why I'm an exhibitionist Lima.

That's all I have to 

say yes ma'am. God damn it. Yes ma'am. 

Yes ma'am. A 

Lima all nevermind. We'll probably cut, we'll probably cut this in post. 

So Sandman, the Sandman Universe, nightmare Country is the story of one Madison Flynn, who, we forgot her name, but we remembered it thought it's in the book, which she would 

know if you had read it.

So the book starts out with Madison Flynn, a new character created by Tinian. Yeah, 

yeah. New cr, new character created by 

Tinian and Tiny End, tiny Onion. And she's in the club. She's kind of a cool hip, young 

Brooklynite. Yeah, she's like a Brooklynite. She's an art student. She's making a lot of paintings.

Her paintings are horrific. They show us images of people. Who are grotesque dismembered, flad, bloody, and there's lots of mouths on them. Teethy mouths. Of course, the, the, the mouths are in the eyes, like the Corinthian. Mm-hmm. But like, her paintings go beyond that and they're fucking freaky. 

Yeah. And she she's on these forums because she, like a bunch of other people who are on these forums, keep seeing this man out in the world.

And this man is basically like the Corinthian, except he's like, extremely swollen. And instead of having teeth for eyes, they're just these thick, like glistening, moist tongues that are just dripping everywhere. It's so gross. It's very gross. And she, like a lot of other people on these forums keep seeing this thing just out in the world 

watching her.

Yeah. So she's painting it, she's painting pictures of it. She's trying to investigate. And she's, she's hooking up with this guy. She's, she's getting laid and the man has a nightmare of her paintings cuz her paintings are fucking scary. And he's in her apartment and the Corinthian visits this nightmare of this man 

and sees the art.

Sees the art because the guy, the hookup guy, is dreaming of the art. So he's constructed in his dream space, the art that is in the real world. The Corinthian sees it and is like, huh, that's a bit fucking weird. Like, I haven't roamed the earth in a very long time, at least since my original version got kaputz at the cereal convention, which he like barely remembers.

So he's like, what the fuck's up with that? 

And yeah. And it basically begins this investigation of like, why would a human be seeing this? It kind of proves to him that. Someone's out there. Someone's out there. If, if people are painting pictures of it, someone's out there and he's, he's gonna go investigate it.

And this is the part of the book where we switch up art style and we enter this like, wonderful description of the dreaming and the Corinthian, and what the Corinthian does. The Corinthian enters nightmares. The Corinthian like, loves to be in the nightmares, like interact with them. Like even during the dream of the man who sees the paintings, he's the, the guy's.

Like, this isn't normally how the dream goes. Are you still going to eat my eyeballs? And the Corinthian's like, yeah, 

yeah. Cause the Corinthian's a bit of a sadist. He loves cutting out eyes and eating them and you know, he's a gross little fuck. I love him. 

That is, that is something that is happening in this book.

Eli Tinian goes off on being a freak, a gross freak. Things are sexy, things are vicious, things are slimy things are. 

Tortured. Yeah. Like, like Tiny Tinian goes all off. Tinian goes off, like Tinian is not averse to going a little intense with some of his books. You see this with something He's killing the children emotionally intense with like nice house in the lake and he doesn't go super terribly hard on it.

But he does get into like the Satanic panic and a bunch of other stuff in Department of Truth, which we will cover at a later date. This is by far his most fuck nasty book. Like this is his, this is him going full Clive Barker, which if we're talking legacies of cle, of queer horror with like Hellraiser and such, Clive Barker is fucking queer.

He is one of us. And he I didn't know that. Yeah, no. Clive Barker's one of us. Whoa. And he, like a lot of his horror is oriented around like, like he is like a queer horror, like forefather, like, and this book is fully leaning into that with especially these redesigns of agony and ecstasy, who I believe, but I'm not a hundred percent sure are legacy characters from like, Sandman and Swamp Thing and such.

Re-imagining them as Gimps, like Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstasy, I believe. Yeah. Mr. Agony has a gimp mask, which covers his eyes, and Mr. Ecstasy has these like hooks that are like holding up his eyelids and his mouth open to be, he's so, so intense looking these horrible, gaping smiles. Like, ugh, like this is a nasty book.

Like this is, this is the nastiest thing. I think I've seen Tiny and Right, and I love it. For that. I wanted to 

see Tiny Cut. You see, you were describing it on Twitter and I was like, oh, I actually need to get into this. Like you were description is how. Freak nasty. It was what kind of hooked me. Yes. 

Oh, I love that.

I love how my descriptions tend to hook people. So I think 

this guy that she's sleeping with doesn't stick around too long. He runs away. She's a bit too scary for him. Mm-hmm. And she's relatable. She doesn't really understand why he's leaving. He's having nightmares and, okay. Is this the tinian stand in actually, now that I look at it?

No, no, no, no. That's not the tinian Stand in. The Tinian Stand in. We will get to that. So the tinian stand-ins at the very end. Right, right, right, right. You're right. So we will, we will get to that in a second. So at the same time as the Corinthian is trying to track Madison Flynn down to figure out what in the fuck is going on, like who are all these people who are seeing some version of me, but that definitely isn't me.

Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstasy are hunting down people who it seems have also seen this creature. And are being hunted down by, or are, are being told to hunt down these people by some mysterious employer who we don't find out who that is until the very end of this book. Who that is, is a doozy and it's gonna be very interesting to see how that plays into the second arc of this 

story.

Yeah. Ooh, I really, really like this book a lot. I'm really glad you convinced me to read it. Yeah, I, I, I really like returning to the Sandman universe. Mm-hmm. I haven't read too much of like, the original books and all that, but I really, really like everything that I've like seen and like experience in the Sandman universe.

And this is just like of today. Yeah. I suppose like when I read Sandman, I'm like, something feels really old fashioned about this. 

Yeah. You know? Cause it started in the very late eighties and went through like the early nineties up through I think 96 was the original. And then it's kind of appeared back sporadically.

Like it appeared back in like with, with Endless Nights in like the two thousands. You see this with some other stuff in the two thousands. Came back in the early 2000 tens, like 2014 with overture, which is finally getting recollected again as part of the paperbacks and then this revival. Yeah. Which has been really wonderful.

Feels very timely. Basically 

the Corinthians starts investigating the, the girl who's doing these paintings and that, I think that tips off God, what are their names? Agony Ecstasy. Yeah. Agony and ecstasy. It tip, it tips them off that they're gonna be discovered by the Corinthian. They go to her.

Mm-hmm. Madison Flynn, and they like burn the place 

down and they try to kill her, but she just barely escapes. 

And then, and she becomes this sort of thing that's hunted throughout 

the book. Yeah. It becomes this cat and mouse game where she's trying to. Figure out like who this toothy man is, what's going on.

He keeps appearing in and out of things. Same with agony, ecstasy, trying to chase her down. She eventually falls under what could be tenuously called the protection of her. One of her friends is a queer sex worker, which I thought was a really cool aspect of this, is how much like queer sex work is like a big aspect of this book.

Oh gosh. Oh, I just remembered. Okay. 

Yeah. Yeah. It's, and then what's gonna come up in the next, it's a lot of pain. It's a, it's a lot of pain. Lot of pain. Yeah. One of her, one of her friends is like, fucking, this guy who like is, is being paid to fuck this guy who is basically like a Republican billionaire.

Like he's just like a weird old racist who like fashions himself. He calls himself, what is it, like a mean old cock sucker? Like he has this whole monologue. Oh, that's right. Yeah. He has this whole monologue where he's like, monologuing at, at her friend who's this sex worker, and he is like, yeah, I'm a mean old cock sucker, and like, You, you young queers, like don't know what it's like.

Like back in the day we used to be like, mean old cocksuckers and just eat each other alive. And he's, he's, he fucking sucks. He's like a weird fetishist too, where he like has this whole complex full of like items that are related to like, like he like has like the fridge where Ed Geen like stored his victim's 

heads.

Yeah. He like collects all these serial killer like 

artifacts. Yeah. Cuz he like briefly caught a glimpse of like the horrors on the other side, which is to say like the more magical infernal side of the universe. He like briefly kind of saw a little bit of that and he's like, if I just gotta collect all these objects and amass all this wealth, she thinks it's, it's like 

the, they're powerful objects that are gonna give him power.

Yeah. That it's going to afford him status and Yeah. And so it kind of becomes like she briefly comes under his protection and then she gets bartered. There's a really terrifying scene and this scene like still gets me. We're like one of her friends that's not the sex worker friend gets caught by agony and ecstasy and she gets like dismembered and like mutilated, but then put back together and agony and ecstasy.

Put these like candles and in her eyes. And what that basically does is like she's alive again, but she's not in control of her own bodies. So she is commanded to kill her friend. Oh God. While still inhabiting her own body, but she can't stop herself from doing it. She still feels pain. She still feels pain.

Like she gets shot by the cops a whole bunch and she's just like, it hurts. Like, I can't, I can't stop trying to hurt you, but this hurts so fucking bad. And like, I like it's, it's genuinely chilling. Like it's maybe the scariest thing besides some of the stuff in Department of Truth that Tinian ever put on a fucking page.

Yeah, it hurts. There's a lot of pain in this. But the art's amazing. The art's amazing. The art's really good. Like between like the main art that Esther in does with, and then, you know, like a murders row of just incredibly talented artists in like Paquette and Sorrentino and Fran of Allah, Danny Campbell.

And we will, we'll get to Maria love's chapter in just a sec, but the last thing I wanna say, this is a bit of a spoiler and it's going to factor into the second arc. The, you, you find out who one of the big bads of this series is going to be. And you find out who's been kind of like, fi, not financing, agony and ecstasy, but who's been financing this republican billionaire guy and working with him.

And you find out it's the Angel Morone, and they don't tell you who the angel Morone is. But if you Google who the Angel Morone is, or if you were 

raised in the Mormon church, you might already 

know the Mormon church because he's the bitch fucking angel that is only in Mormons. Is is only in, only in Mormons.

He's only in the Mormon faith. I mean maybe also in Mormons. And his, his whole goal is he's like, I hate those dorks up in the silver city. I believe in this weird, fucked up like Mormon vision of America or whatever. So I have to go like alter the world in this fucked up way, which is going to become a plot later on where he's like trying to change the world by basically like, like he basically like wants to make it explicitly like the horrible white supremacist state that the United States already is.

But he's basically like, yeah, that's not enough. We need to make it worse. Like, he's like, we need to go like full, like fucked up like ethno state kind of shit. It is shit. It is like, it 

is an amazing villain. It is an amazing villain. It is like a, 

like to bring in this 

angel that as, as the angel of death, which is.

Two Mormons. Like a pretty holy character. 

Yeah. And to just make him like the villain is so fucking funny. Like, it's so correct and it's so catty. It's so caddy. It's so fucking catty. It's like, like I, I, I just, it's kind of like 

some Mormon delo, like, you, like, 

like I had to Google it. I was like, who the fuck is the Angel Marotti?

And it's the one in all of the statues, like if you're like around like salt. It's the, it's the horn blower. It's the Hornblower angel. Yeah. Yeah. It's the Hornblower angel. And he's like, I've been wandering America for like centuries and, and I want to work with you Horrible, like gay republican billionaire to like, make the world objectively so much fucking worse.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Throughout the book, we also get to see a dream. Yeah. Dream. 

The King of Dreams. The king of dreams. Specifically at this point, not Morpheus, but Daniel who, it's complicated. We won't, we could, we could spend another 20 minutes talking about how Daniel comes into being, but like, Yeah.

Anyway, he's the second dream. You, we, we see a bunch of him. We see Lucy and the library maker, or not maker, but sorry, , the librarian. Oh, that was 

fun. When we were going through the library and they were describing like how dreams work and stuff. Oh, it's tight. The book's really good at describing like actually the landscape of the Sandman universe.

There's 

a really beautiful, like one of the interludes in issue three I think it is, that Franso Valla illustrates is like this really cool bit where, where Franza Villa, Fran Villa might be Franza Villa, not a hundred percent sure on the pronunciation, but Yeah. Corinthian is on basically the shores of, of the dreaming.

Like he's out at the outer edges where like primordial nightmares who haven't been like shaped yet are coming out of the surf. And most of them just kind of die once they come up on shore because they're just like primordial vagaries. Oh, right, right, right. And concepts. And he's just like watching all of them die.

And he just kind of comes out there cuz he's, he's a shaped nightmare. But these are nightmares that are just incredibly esoteric, not fully formed as, as ideas. It's very short-lived, very short-lived, and they die. But the few that don't immediately die often crawl up to him. And like, they never communicate directly.

But he gets this idea that they're kind of like begging him of, of like, how, how, how are we supposed to live? Like, like, like what can we do? And the Corinthian has this, this i, this thing where he's like, actually it, I mean, I can't tell them this because they pretty much immediately die and they couldn't understand me even if like, they could hear.

But like, it's actually better if they just crawled back into the primordial lose because they're, they can live, they can't live up here. Like they, they, they are too unshaped to ever survive outside of like, The, the vast like subconscious space of, of, of human nightmare. Once they become or try to become conscious, they can't exist.

But in that unconscious, unfathomable space, they can still have shape, they can still have concept like, and it's kind of a really touching scene. It's like, oddly, oddly, a touching scene with the Corinthian. Yeah. It's a 

scene. You saying this was 

Franco Villa? That's Franco Villa, 

yeah. So yeah. The book has so many different artists.

Mm-hmm. You turn the page and all of a sudden we're in a different art style. And oftentimes when we're in a different art style, it's because we're talking about the landscape of like the dreaming or the landscape of the library. Mm-hmm. Or this beautiful ocean scene where the Corinthian is watching.

Unformed horrors, like try to stand on their own two feet. Yeah. And it, it's, it's a really interesting texture for 

the book. It's a really interesting texture. 

Like it's a little jarring, but you're like, oh, okay. Like I have this visual cue that like, we're somewhere else and we're talking about something 

else.

Yeah. And it works too. Cause they, it works, they keep the, the title pages, or not the title pages, but they, they keep the credit pages. Yeah. From the single issues, which does help ease the transition of like, oh, we're suddenly in a new space. And then you kind of get that with Danny's, like when they're going into the history of Chase Magazine, which is that snuff porn magazine that's briefly like referenced and talked about in, in the second volume of Doll's House.

And then you also get some of the other stuff from a doll's house, like the actual serial killer convention. You get that with Aaron Campbell. It's, it's really cool that they have those. We were given a code on online to, to read a free preview of the issue that's coming out next week because we work for a comics retailer, so we got to see a preview of it.

They don't continue that. And I'm kind of bummed cuz I really liked those interludes and I'm kind of sad they're not coming back. At least they didn't come back for the first issue.

It really feels like tiny in is pouring his whole heart into this. Yeah. Like the, the intro at the beginning of the book where he is just like, sandmans everything. To me, Sandman is like, what bring me into comics. Like Neil Gaiman is like my hero and like, if it wasn't for the Sandman, like I wouldn't be here writing today.

And when they approached me to talk to, to do the Sandman, it was, I, it was an immediate. And he's doing some amazing, amazing work in this. Like when it comes to the Sandman universe, nightmare country, it's a little slept on, I think. And I think that people need to start reading it because it's, it's feeling important.

Yeah. Like an important, like work in the, in comics right now, like I'm, I keep saying this with all of Tiny's work right now, but it's some of the best work on the shelves. 

It really is some of the best work on the shelves, and this is no exception. Absolutely. And I think it pairs really, really well with, again, we'll talk about another day, but Department of Truth in a lot of ways it, it kind of bridges a lot of his series, like Nightmare Country does.

Like, it kind of touches into some of what something is killing the children with, like the, how the children create their own nightmares. It touches into like Nice House on the Lake with like concepts of like, control it to, it taps into like a lot of what Department of Truth is doing and the ways that we like.

Can like reshape the world through the power. Like honestly a bunch of Department of Truth is really inspired by, like, I talk a lot about it as like the invisibles for the age of Qan on, but like it you, you can't really talk about it without the Sandman being a part of that, that conversation too. Oh.

And like I can't believe I neglected to ever mention that until now. But yeah, there's a little bit of like Sandman in Department of Truth as well in a much more like it's a deep influence for Tiny End. It's a deep, deep-seated influence. And to briefly talk about the end of this volume, because we've mentioned it so far, Tinian always has like a self insert that reflects his fears in one of these books.

In this one, the sixth chapter cuts to a completely new character. Oh, right, right. Who is tiny and self insert, who's like, writing this without getting into the weeds of it too much is like writing this like true crime entertainment series that's based off a, a girl's very recent murder. And he got like hired to do this.

Like he's getting. Obscene amounts of money for this money that like, could really materially help him. But he's also like, I do feel kind of weird that I am like doing this true crime thing about this girl who was like very likely, like horribly killed, and I'm supposed to be brought on to make this weird dramatization Oh God.

Of it. And like, 

whoa, that, that brings back things for me. Like, God, that that's just that I hate that shit the way that like people's real horrors and like Mm. And especially when it's so recent, it just starts to get eaten up. Yeah. By like the media. Yeah. Like that's just so, that's so gross to me. 

Yeah.

Tiny ends tapping into a bunch of stuff. Like so real, so 

real. Like a lot of stuff that happens in. Daytime dramas and TV and movie, they're, people are pulling stories from real life and sometimes they're just instant like that. 

Yeah. And sometimes like, actually pulling, like, not just like inspired by, but like actively about like dramatizing, dramatizing for profit.

Like people's very, like real suffering and like trauma and ways that are really fucking fetishistic and weird and how that like ends up like relating back to a lot of the themes of sex work in, in this, cuz like, it's not that like sex work is painted as like inherently these things, but what this book is getting into like is these kind of predatory sex work relationships.

And we won't get into that too much, but like the book does really kind of get into that with like her friend whose name I'm forgetting and another character who's gonna come up in Glasshouse as well. Like the kind of ways in which like we take up, we take people, particularly queer people and also like people of color and just like chew them up and spit them back out like, For, for profit, how we use and abuse people.

It's, it's pretty dark. Like it does a good job of like not being too heavy with like, how it approaches these themes, but like, it, it, it doesn't get super grizzly about it, but it is getting into some pretty, pretty rough real shit. Like it's, it's touching on a lot of stuff. I, I, I, I think it's his best book.

That's not Department of Truth. Like I think Ed and Department of Truth are his best books. Yeah. And I say this is someone who loves all his 

work. The, the final chapter part six is kind of a lead in into Dead Boy Detectives. Mm-hmm. Yeah. With Sine Tessy. Yeah. It goes into Thessy, the Witch and it, and yeah.

It brings in this character that's very a stand-in for Tiny in Yeah. Writing know, basically a horror writer. Mm-hmm. And. If you're reading Dead Boy Detective, like it's, it's, it's a really good lead 

into that. Yeah. It's not necessary to have read both of these things, but they are leading into each other a little bit.

Yeah. They're small through lines. They're on the, the, in 

the Sandman universe 

of today. And that is a cool thing that also happened in the other, like the initial Sandman Universe launches, was that like you could read Books of Magic Hellblazer, Lucifer house of Whispers. You could read them all separately and you wouldn't have to like have touched the others.

But there are small through lines that you can trace across the books to kind of show that these books are happening at the same time, which was very much a vertigo staple back in the day. Was that like, yeah, these are all separate series, but like, I think like Sandman references in the Sandman, I think they referenced the Family Man serial killer from from what was going on in, in early Hellblazer at the time.

They reference the family man. Like there's, it's like swamp thing. References like, oh, Hellblazer and Hellblazer and Swamp Thing are, are pretty connected as well. Oh. Like, actually Constantine started as a Hellblazer character. I didn't know that. Or sorry, sorry. Constantine started as a Swamp Thing character.

He was a Swamp thing character. Right? He was like a one-off swamp thing character. But then people really liked him so much. Alan Moore created him technically, and then people really, really liked him. And so Alan Moore is like, well, I don't really want to write Constantine, but my friend Jamie Delano was down to do it.

And Jamie Delano was like, Hey, so if you heard of this woman called Maggie Thatcher, I fucking hate her. The amount that Jamie Delano hates Margaret Thatcher kind of gives me life. Like he, he just fucking hates Margaret Thatcher so deeply. That's lovely. That's like the first like 40 inches of Hellblazer is like, that's just lovely.

How many ways can I say fuck Margaret Thatcher? It's really dope. But yeah, like a lot of classic vertigo was like that we're like, A lot, or at least a lot of those, the same like dark fantasy horror stuff was like, you know, the original Lucifer Comics spun out of season of Miss From Hell, from Sandman and then kind of did its own thing, but like occasionally would like relate back to other stuff.

So all the book kind of like would touch back in with each other a little bit or have these weird little through lines where like, you wouldn't have to read the other ones, but you could get some, you don't 

have to read Dead Boy Detective, but if you read it alongside Santa Man Universe, nightmare Country, like they go hand in hand.

Yep. And like yeah, the, the end of this book, one part six of the series is basically a lead in in Dead Boy detectives. Exactly. But you know, not necessary. Yeah, I get what you mean. Yeah. 

So no, it's, it's very cool that they're doing that again and I do appreciate this new batch of, of Sandman books and I really hope they keep doing more of 'em cuz like, Lucifer kind of got fucked over because like they were going to, they kind of just told Dan Waters like, okay, you don't actually get the last five issues of your series, kind of, we're just gonna let you release it as a graphic novel. Sea Spurrier's Hellblazer, as has been noted on this show, got canceled for no fucking reason. And I will fight DC about it. Like, yeah, and, and then the dreaming had a good run.

Like the c Spurrier did a bunch of the dreaming. Same with g Willa Wilson was on the dreaming for a while. Anyway, we're, we're getting it lost in the sauce. But yes, we've talked about so 

much today. We have talked about quite a lot today. We mostly Tiny 

In 

Mostly Tiny in, it was Tiny in Time. 

It was tiny in Time.

So we talked about Nice. Do you, I wrap things up or should we keep talking about, because we could go in on w the whore. Was kind 

of like the plan. Yeah. I mean, I'm down, but 

I think we're like more than an hour and a half in, which was kind of 

our Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm game to stop for the day, but I'm also game to hear about w The Who.

Okay. I think, I think I will save it for next time. Okay. W the Who is a book that kind of appeared outta nowhere for me inside the, the comic shop, and I was really fascinated by the cover and the title. Mm-hmm. It's actually a book from like, I think the nineties, right? Yeah. Yeah. It, it was translated for the first 

time.

Yeah. It was a German series that started in the nineties. Yeah. It's 

fascinating. I'm really, 

really interested to hear your thoughts. It's, 

it's really, it's very poetic and cool. But anyways, I have a bunch of notes on it. I, I do wanna talk about it. I think we can start to wrap things up now though.

Absolutely. So, yeah, today we talked about Nice House on the Lake. Mm-hmm. James Tiny in the. Writer and we talked about Nightmare Country. Nightmare Country Sandman, nightmare Country. We talked about something's killing the Children. We got led into Sins of the Black 

Flamingo. Mm-hmm. As a little like intro.

I 

don't think we meant to do that, but yeah. Sins of Black Flamingo. Check it out. And then what else did we talk 

about? I don't think we talked about anything else. I, I think we stayed squarely on that. We didn't hit Fuck This Place number seven, which I'll briefly say. Fantastic. Fuck this place. Number seven is excellent.

Fuck this place is some of the best. R is is the best writing of Kyle Stark's career. Artie on top. Lin's Cartooning is phenomenal. It like, it, it's a really NSYNC art team. Really good lesbian horror that balances the silly and like just the absolutely fucking brutal. We've talked about it on the show before.

Go fucking read it. 

Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should trade weight on it. Yeah. And then, and then talk about book two. 

That'd be a good idea. Cause we did kind of talk about book one, so like, maybe, maybe we'll trade weight discussions on it. I did not talk 

about X-Men once during this podcast. Wow. It's a first. Oh God.

I could have, we could have gone the whole, the whole time without talking about X-Men, but I just had to bring it up, didn't I? We're in the sins of sinister. So 

Ooh. Wait, 4,000 years ahead now. Does Phantom X finally get pregnant? 

don't didn't find new Mexican. Pregnant and that's what that ship was.

Wait, I forget. 

No, that's, Hey, grant Morrison's run? No, that's his like second brain. Oh right. That's his second brain slash like maybe either, maybe they're just roommates or maybe they're like girlfriends. I can't really tell. Hmm. It's been a while since I read Morrison's X-Men, but I actually 

read it fairly recently and I kind of forget.

And then, yeah, we wanted to talk about Dune Patrol. We did not. Let's not talk about Superman. We did not. And we wanna talk about Dan Them all. We did not. 

Damn them all. Number six. Fantastic conclusion to the Arc. We're finally getting another one. Love to see it. We don't know when that's coming out. Is the book gonna come out soon?

Is what the book, yeah. Trait's coming out and I think may I wanna say also God has entered the chat. Yeah. God, the cunt from his high, high seat and holy heaven has now entered the chat. Things are about to get real fucked up and damn them all. I'm excited. It's, it's gonna be good. Alright, 

so we will be back next week.

Sorry for the hiatus. We really had to step back and be accountable for the Lima, for the Lima 

coup, 

the lima coup right, the coup of Lima. I love you and I hope to see you next week. 

And I love you too. One of us tells the truth and the other tells lies. Good luck telling who it is. Bye everybody.

Bye. Bye boy.