Oliver Bly talks The Mushroom Knight

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[00:01:29] This is Byron O'Neill, your host for today's episode of the Crypti Creator Corner. Today I'm joined by illustrator cartoonist Oliver Bly to chat about his new ecological fantasy original graphic novel The Mushroom Knight dropping soon from Mad Cape.

[00:01:42] It's always a pleasure to meet a fellow Pacific Northwestern transplant even if it's not where I live now. It will always be home or one of mine anyway. So Oliver, how are things going today? Oh, they are wonderful. We actually have the sun peeped out today.

[00:01:57] That's a rare. Yeah, the past couple of days for early February. We've had a very sunny February. So I'm basking it as much as my current workload allows. Well, hopefully that is not indicative of like wildfire season in the summers because like. Oh yeah. Hopefully not.

[00:02:18] You know, we'll still have rain at night and kind of misty mornings, but the sun comes up and has been burning it away a little bit. That's awesome. Yeah.

[00:02:29] But when I saw the general solicits from Med Cave about this, I knew I wanted to hear more about this kind of unique project. One of my degrees is in environmental science and and yes, I am a tree hugger.

[00:02:38] I will say that openly who honestly has a rather dire outlook about where we're headed as a species, especially given my other degree is an anthropology.

[00:02:47] So I'm kind of viewing everything through this longitudinal lens, which doesn't paint exactly the brightest picture of humanity and us making great decisions. This is not so grim.

[00:02:58] I don't want to paint the picture at the mushroom night is that, you know, there's no prophetic doom or not overtly anyway that I read. There is a promise though to delve a little bit deeper than a standard kids vehicle with mushrooms bugs, you know.

[00:03:14] What it is ultimately I will have to leave up to other readers my own read through was definitely one of. Okay. That's interesting. That's a novel approach to how to go about meshing these different narrations, you know, kind of where is all we're going with this?

[00:03:28] But let's not get too ahead of ourselves. So the basic long line logline here, you've got a fairy mushroom night, growly trot and growly trot, right? Gally trot. Gally trot. Yes. That's going to trip me up every time. Oh, no, I apologize. He wouldn't mind at all.

[00:03:44] Well, he's embarked on a quest to deal with a kind of a mysterious threat to the Woodland Kingdom. And along the way, he encounters a human girl, Lem, who has lost her dog beans.

[00:03:54] And as she traipses through the woods in search of him, the two cross paths and their destinies kind of become one. So let's sort of start at the beginning here because I think this is all about metaphors. And I love the way you set this up.

[00:04:07] There's exposition about all the amazing life that is in our soil system. And then there's a human trotting all over it from the visual perspective of the soil level looking up. So is this you looking at mushrooms in the park?

[00:04:25] Like, is that you in the story, I guess, there? Oh, man, that is a really great question that I cannot answer. OK. But I'm going to say anything more about that aside from the fact that the book itself is probably

[00:04:41] less a fantasy book than it is a mystery book. Yeah. Yeah. And the earth is mysterious, mushrooms are mysterious. And these characters, both Lem and Gallitra are going through personal mysteries. And that's where they their paths coalesce together.

[00:04:59] And on the way, there's a bunch of clues, both in the art and in the context of the dialogue and the situations that the characters find themselves in. So if you are an eagle-eyed reader, you might start picking up on a couple. OK.

[00:05:18] Where does this love of mycology come from? It's the mushroom night. Where does your love of mushrooms? Where did that begin? I guess, you know, I've been a outdoorsy person since I was a kid.

[00:05:34] And by that, I mean just someone that goes outside and would play in the woods. And like to be outdoors. And I think the love of mushrooms or just the interest or fascination in them comes from just going on walks in the woods when you're

[00:05:55] strolling and sort of just observing your eyes will sort of comb across the ground. And every once in a while, there's just this object there that is quite unlike all the other objects in the woods or the other plants.

[00:06:09] And I guess mushroom foraging or hunting kind of came out of that. Additional fun you can have when you're going through a walk and you start paying attention and looking for mushrooms.

[00:06:23] You know, you kind of enter into a meditative state when your eyes are kind of combing around and brushing through bushes across tree bark. And then there's these little almost like art installations and mushrooms are so vibrant. They can be in so many interesting colors.

[00:06:35] They come in so many different shapes. And they all have their own kind of personalities. And so and they're also kind of easy to overlook if you're just kind of trotting along and not really paying close attention.

[00:06:48] So if you start looking for mushrooms, you know, you kind of enter into a meditative state and you're really paying close attention. So if you go through and you want to go out and do a hike because hiking is lovely

[00:06:55] and it's nice to get out and experience the natural world, looking for mushrooms kind of becomes something to do while you're doing that. And it's kind of like this entryway into getting kind of a meditative state of peacefully just observing and looking and watching.

[00:07:10] And then all of a sudden underneath something there's this bright little pop of orange and it might only be, you know, maybe a quarter of an inch in size or it could be large and on the bark of a rotting tree.

[00:07:24] So the roundabout way of answering your question, I guess, I got into mushrooms when I was younger and then probably again as an adult, I got more into understanding what their names were, what the stories were. And just being fascinated with mycology in general because it's

[00:07:41] such a diverse kingdom of life. Well, you centered the story. Forgive me if I pronounced this one wrong too, but the Wisa Hickon? Wisa Hickon, yes. All right. So that's a data preserve in Northwestern Philadelphia area. And I believe you lived there in that area for a time.

[00:07:58] Was it as simple as just wanting to center the story in your backyard if you... Yeah, I think the Wisa Hickon is a really special place in Philadelphia. And it is cherished by a lot of Philadelphians for being a really nice

[00:08:17] refuge from some of the immersive city-ness of Philly. Be it noise, you know, landscape that you break through from the concrete and just kind of spill out in this big, lush, forested jungle area that's just teeming with life, especially in the summertime.

[00:08:37] Philadelphia is almost tropical in the summer. And the city blooms up with greenery of grasses and plants breaking up the concrete and in abandoned lots, but also, of course, in the Wisa Hickon in our parks really come to life.

[00:08:55] And it takes up a lot of real estate in Philadelphia. It's a large part of the city. It's not quite like Central Park in New York, which is framed in. It's kind of on the edge of the city.

[00:09:09] And so when you get in there, you are in nature. You can find parts of it that you'll see, you know, Lincoln Drive and see the cars tuning around. But there's other parts that you'll get in that it's very serene

[00:09:20] and you're very, very surrounded by trees and the various plants and of course the bubbling creek itself. Yeah, I'm curious because I've always in my past as landscape photographer and like having lived in eight different states, I think.

[00:09:37] I've always seen this huge difference in this wilderness urban interface from the East Coast to the West Coast. And I'm wondering kind of what your experience of it has been more as a Pacific Northwestern transplant now. You know, the book depicts a very hard line with those interfaces

[00:09:52] between the two biomes and OK, some people might might take issue with calling cities biomes, but it's my podcast and that's how I look at it. So, you know, feel free to disagree, but I would agree. OK, good. In my own experience in the West Coast, having lived

[00:10:06] in both California and Washington is that that line becomes a little more blurry. It's much more integrated. Nature feels like much more a part of your living daily experience. You know, has that been your experience like between the two poles or?

[00:10:24] Yeah, I mean, I guess in in in the concrete sections of Philadelphia, you do get it is a biome and you do get various flora and fauna there. But it is Philadelphia does feel sometimes and in some neighborhoods, particularly very concreted over. Yeah. Very the ground is gone.

[00:10:45] The dirt is gone. It is just concrete and roads and houses. The backyards have in some areas traditionally been paved over too. So if you have a backyard of your roll home, you could go out. And then it's just another concrete slab and concrete slab.

[00:11:00] And there's reasons for that. And, you know, with a lot of houses that have been renovated people, people break up the concrete and re kind of. Re planting some of the area and there's urban farmers and what have you that that are trying to change that a bit.

[00:11:17] But out here in comparison, Olympia is a lot smaller as far as a city goes. And it's downtown. The footprints pretty small. I've been up to Seattle a few times. Seattle is very green, especially I'm going to be up at the Convention Center for Emerald City,

[00:11:34] Comic Con in a couple of weeks. That convention center is really framed by a little parklet and a lot of evergreen trees. And it's very beautific where you think of the Philadelphia Convention Center. It's got its own beauty framed by the neighborhood that it's in.

[00:11:49] But there is that. You are sort of scabbed off from the earth, from the soil in very significant ways. And so in Philadelphia, I think parks become really important. And Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods. There's a lot of neighborhood identity there.

[00:12:10] And the neighborhoods are all very protective of the parks that they have. And depending on which one you're talking about some, you know, their community gardens that people have sort of claimed the land because it's been abandoned and have cleaned it up and tended to it

[00:12:24] and made them safe, beautiful places for gardening, farming or just communal enjoyment to have that little green space as an oasis amongst all the all the beige stone and concrete and red brick. Yeah, there was a really strong distinction in the mushroom night

[00:12:41] when you're moving out of the park into that more urban biome and the color change, the amount of trash was just really a stark illustration to me. So talk about what made that distinction between those two so important visually that you wanted to present it in that way?

[00:13:07] Well, the book itself, I suppose, deals a lot with juxtapositions both between the city and the woodland, but also fantasy and reality. Or in this case, it's this. I want to say it's imagining a world, but the the fantastical elements.

[00:13:27] There's there's the idea that there's in the Whistahick and there's communities of sort of sprites, little fairy-like beings that have their own villages and their own cultures. And they're they can't be seen by humans or at least most humans. And so the book is about crossing that barrier

[00:13:47] and reality and fantasy kind of mean each other, reality and imagination. And then the city is also another juxtaposition where you can see kind of especially, you know, it's set in Philadelphia in 1996 and you can really. You know, feel that this is a man made place,

[00:14:11] that this is a place that was built out of our separation and maybe from nature or our domination of it or our taming of it or whatever you want to, you know, terms you want to use to describe

[00:14:24] the way we've kind of put our our stamp on it. And nothing's like a harder stamp than concrete, you know, like it's such a. When I say it's scabbed over with concrete, there is that that big boundary, that really hard boundary of like

[00:14:48] this is what the land was like and this is what it looks like now. It isn't really a gradient. It is hard and Philadelphia is also the way the city blocks go. There it's a very, I'm going to put this like square city,

[00:15:07] like the it kind of bends and turns that there's some more organic organically mapped out places, but a lot of the roads just go up or down or they go left and right and cross over. So it's very blocked in these grids, which is also a very hard

[00:15:24] manmade kind of factory vibe that you get. We're, of course, a wisteria hick and sprawling, you know, it follows a creek. It has a gorge to it. There's these erupting stones and trees and everything that even visually. You change kind of vibes going from.

[00:15:47] You know, Chris crossing and zigzagging around all these square blocks. And then you sprawl and you kind of flow with the creek and around the different trails have you. Well, the the mushroom night big picture digs into this deep ecology principle.

[00:16:04] Principles plural, I think there are eight, technically. But the main thing that I got was moving away from this anthropocentric lens and examining holistically kind of how human kind in nature intertwine, but we've got these two big elements that aren't working harmoniously and without giving too much away.

[00:16:25] Nature even takes from human kind in an odd role reversal sorts. So talk to me about some of the inspirations kind of behind a mushroom night and why you wanted to lay the story out in that

[00:16:38] way that was like a little bit combative, at least at the beginning. Hmm. Just to have me rephrase that, why? Why is there a tension between the? Yeah, exactly. Tension would be a really good word to describe. You just kind of

[00:16:57] as these two things meshed as these two characters, destinies, if you will, became intertwined, because I've seen a lot in the solicits about it becoming a friendship. And maybe maybe that's down the line or something like that. But that is not the initial read, I guess.

[00:17:16] Oh, I see. Yeah, I got you. I got you. Well, I will say this at the jump. It's so this story that's going to market early next month is just the first part. It's almost the first act. There's two more books coming.

[00:17:31] So if you get to the end of it and you're kind of like, wow, that wasn't kind of like a totally complete OGM in the way a lot of graphic novels are because it's kind of the beginning of a bigger OGM, which might be the

[00:17:44] the first part of something else. But the story will be completed in three installments and at the jump, this is where the characters do meet. And it is it is a strange meeting. So Lemuel Clemens has entered into the woods looking for her missing

[00:18:06] dog beans. That's what draws her into the Wisset Hickan, and that's where she's going to meet Gallitra the mushroom knight. And he is on a quest to retrieve this magical crystal called the candle fly. It's almost a magical mysterious battery that powers

[00:18:26] their technology in this gnome kingdom that Gallitra is a part of. And so while he's searching for it, eventually he finds Lemuel who has found it herself. And it seems to induce into her kind of a trance like state. And he borrows a bit of her, I guess,

[00:18:47] what could be best described as life energy or a bit of her spirit in order to heal himself up to be able to get home safe and sound with his quarry, which is the candle fly, this magical crystal. And. Why they meet this way

[00:19:09] is a good question that I don't really have a ready answer for, besides this book really came intuitively. And I don't I also don't want to maybe give away too many important parts of the mystery that's going to be developed a little later on.

[00:19:29] But Lem is, I will say, in a very emotionally vulnerable state when she makes this link with this creature and he too is in a very emotionally vulnerable state, and that is what will essentially connect them.

[00:19:46] And as far as maybe the difference between the human worlds and the sort of fairy fantasy world in the book that are separate, I do like the idea that it's maybe these creatures have evolved to be invisible from humans.

[00:20:06] So what I describe it as they would just sort of vibrate on a different frequency. They're overlapping in environment, but they're just slightly off. They're kind of ghosts or spirits. Yeah. But maybe humans evolved not to see them. Maybe there's something in us coming

[00:20:20] across them or fully seeing them in all their glory that is detrimental to our organism that it would get in the way of our work that we're doing here on this planet. And whether or not it's one or the other, I think will be explored later on.

[00:20:36] OK, but it was fascinated by kind of the bridge to connect these two characters, which is beans, the dog, you know? Well, our pets are kind of an intermediary of sorts between the human experience and the natural world, kind of one step removed through domestication.

[00:20:53] She could have had any reason for running around in the woods ultimately. So you talked about it just kind of being intuitive. So this is me just being curious, right? So why the dog? Why the vehicle of the dog? Is there a significant importance?

[00:21:11] Beans to that being the catalyst. Wow, I think you sort of hit the nail on the head there is that she's already having a relationship with something that's outside of the human experience. And I think the relationships that we have with animals are really fascinating, they're really beautiful.

[00:21:31] I'm a dog lover myself and I love animals in general. But being able to communicate without words is so powerful. And well, you can talk to your pets and they can learn sort of associations with what those words mean.

[00:21:51] A lot of the connections that you're having are built on other ways of communicating together, and I would say that maybe even lem strong bond with beans might be a primer to how she can relate to other things that are that are unhuman.

[00:22:11] OK, that makes a lot of sense. And I want to circle back to the candleflies, fireflies, are they the same thing? I mean, coming I grew up in the south. We always call them fireflies. I'm not exactly sure if they're the same species or but they're close.

[00:22:29] And you find them popping up with some significance in mythologies around the world. So did their specific inclusion have an importance to you as a person? I mean, if you can't give it away because it's tied into the narrative, I totally get it.

[00:22:49] So no, a candlefly is not the same as a firefly. OK, but it is where a firefly would be luminous in and of itself. A candle fly is I think a colloquial name.

[00:23:06] Kind of want to Google it right now for a fly that would be nicknamed to that because it is going towards the candle. It is going towards the light. It isn't the light itself, but it's drawn to it. And I guess maybe a statement,

[00:23:21] sort of a poetic psychological statement to consider the candlefly or just the concept of a candle fly would be if you don't yield or reconcile with your past or with your childhood,

[00:23:38] you will be drawn to it in your adult life like a moth to a flame or a fly to the candle. And there is maybe another way to look at this book. I think there's maybe three different ways of kind of exploring this story.

[00:23:59] And one perspective is sort of the way we've been talking about. It's a girl with a missing dog. She goes looking for it and finds this mushroom fairy. And then they develop a relationship that both informs each other's journey. And that set in 1996.

[00:24:15] But there's maybe a second perspective where there is an adult character, an adult version of this girl, Lemuel, who is maybe closer in our present day. And she's maybe going through a process later on in her life where she is

[00:24:36] looking to heal places in her life where her personality formed maybe in difficult ways around adversity. And she may or may not be doing a psilocybin assisted therapy in order to go back and reprocess some of these formative events in her life. OK. And with that lens,

[00:25:07] you can kind of view the book. It's magic and some of the beans in it and maybe a different way I'll put it there for now. OK, I mean, it sounds like basically the reconciling of childhood trauma. Yeah, I'd say. Yeah, the integration and the healing of

[00:25:33] and I would say not just childhood trauma, but maybe in like a smaller trauma too. Sure. Because I think life itself is filled with tons of events that are formative in ways that are painful, but don't quite renounce, I think, in popular consciousness yet as being

[00:25:54] traumatic, although they think psychologists in some circles would argue that they are. I live with one. So yeah, they OK. OK, yeah, there you go. Yeah, right. Well, I want to jump into your artistic style. It's very narrow in terms of the line work.

[00:26:10] There's little to no brush shading that helps define shadow areas. So visually for a forest floor, which you normally think of as a darker environment, it reads very open, very spacious. I was reading about how newspaper comic strips and especially the peanuts influenced you as an illustrator.

[00:26:29] So how does how does that play out in the mushroom night? Oh, good question. I feel like I'm still finding my voice quite a bit with illustration. I come from an animation background, but in animation, I was primarily working in motion graphics

[00:26:47] with some stop motion animation and some paper animation. So I would do hand drawn animation rarely. So in comics is really when I'm sitting down and doing hard illustration work and playing with style and I'm still sort of developing there.

[00:27:05] And I feel like incorporating shadow is daunting because it's just if I go to the clean line technique, which is sort of a European way of drawing that you'll see in comics ranging from Mobius to Tintin, where they traditionally don't use quite as much black as American comics

[00:27:24] traditionally has in shadow work, I might have you. And they sort of look like engineer drawings, you know, which I really like mechanical drawings. If you strip away the colors, a lot of times the line weight is consistent throughout the foreground and the background.

[00:27:36] There's not that much variance. And again, they don't rely on heavy shadows in order to inform information and to convey the picture. For me, I always liked that look. But also when you start bringing shadow and it becomes this other dimension that you're working with.

[00:27:56] And I feel both thematically right now. I like the ties. It makes the work, I think, without the shadow look more like a like a biology illustration, like what would be in the text book a little bit because it is so clear and clean.

[00:28:18] But then also thematically of like a lemul being at the precipice of where the shadows are coming in that I've thought about, oh, maybe I'll start actually bringing shadow into my work as I feel more comfortable working with heavy blacks in comic work.

[00:28:32] And then when that might be a way that she's thematically seen life is maybe going more into a black and white binary where there is like these distinct good things and bad things. As her personality continues to form. OK. Yeah. I mean, it's a really interesting style.

[00:28:48] The thing that jumped in my mind was Mobius, like just that the curvature of the line work, the way everything reads is very reminiscent of me of that style. Gallitra, you know, his aesthetic looks a bit Japanese.

[00:29:05] You know, he's got a Lord Raiden vibe, at least in terms of the modern interpretation of the God of Thunder with the hat. When you were kind of populating the fairy realm, how did you go about creating that form language for all the characters?

[00:29:19] Because it's varied and broad. It's not when I originally looked at I was going through this and I was the thing that kept coming back to mind was the Smurfs, right? So the Smurfs, these little fairy villages and they have it is everything is very, very repetition.

[00:29:38] This is not that at all. You know, these characters have their own distinct form languages that are unique. Yeah, I'll stop talking to you. But. Oh, yeah. Well, I'll say as far as the aesthetic goes, it was really since it's set

[00:29:58] in the mid 90s and it's one of the lenses we enter the world through is through Lemmules who's about 12 or 13 years old. I wanted to pull from what pop culture language both I grew up with, but she grew up with as well.

[00:30:15] That was sort of of the time. OK, and I think. You know, everything from the cartoon David the Gnome, there is one called the littles, there's all Smurfs, of course. There's a lot of. Stories about little creatures was trending for a little while in the early

[00:30:34] 90s or late 80s. Trollkins. Remember those guys too? Over there, Trollkins. Trollkins, yeah, they lived in trees. They were little little trolls. I don't know that one. So I'm going to have to add that to the watch list. There you go.

[00:30:49] But yeah, so some of the character design stuff was kind of influenced through that through just lifelong influences like peanuts. But then filtered through, I think, this strange biological world of mushrooms. And there is sort of a spiritual lens to the book, too.

[00:31:13] So I wanted there to be sort of some esoteric flavor in some of the designs. So you kind of have this match up of stuff that looks pretty cuddly, that looks like it could kind of be in a kid's cartoon.

[00:31:27] But then there's just this little edge to it that's kind of pointing out that this is still reality that still is connected to the real world. This still is Philadelphia, you know, with all its beauty and all its terrors.

[00:31:43] And so all the character designs, I think, have a little edge to them, a little bit of oddness. They all have some teeth. Yeah, that the correlation now makes a lot of sense, because especially with respect to coloring, it's a palette that feels very

[00:32:00] children's show, very familiar Sesame Street even. Yeah. You know, but. The the brighter choices are not in any way limited to the puppet characters, you know, but they inhabit the whole world. So aside from, hey, you like a good gradient filter, which is which is clear.

[00:32:18] You know, what was your approach to to color palette for that? Yeah, I love a good kind of retro gradient between orange or and light blue or pink. And stuff like that, I think are really wonderful. And they were very ala mode back then, too.

[00:32:39] I really like the colors of, you know, early comic books just before we dipped into doing digital coloring, where you still had a lot of hard magentas and yellows. And I guess for the palette inspiration, there was a couple cartoons out

[00:33:00] of Cosgrove Hall of Production Studio, Danger Mouse. Yeah. Count Ducula, where you'd have these really saturated pops of color that were almost like candy colors. And then they'd be on backgrounds that are kind of more washed out or desaturated. And I think that.

[00:33:20] Lens, those actually two cartoons are a really good example of sort of whimsy and very cartoony, very childlike characters or I wouldn't even call them childlike, necessarily, but the backgrounds and overall contrast between them and the color

[00:33:37] palettes of the worlds that they inhabited, lended a sort of macabre to them a certain they did round being this. So it wasn't too saccharine, but you got this great legibility with these stark colors, the characters read super well and became iconic in your mind.

[00:33:56] And then the backgrounds being subdued and kind of gritty. I think, you know, I keep going back to, you know, teeth, you know, like it bad teeth, it felt like you could you could. I don't know, find some gravity there.

[00:34:12] Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a note of horror and that's a loaded word, right? Sure. But there's definitely something of the other that is not purely this thread of saccharine, you know, kid digestible, you know,

[00:34:31] little kid digestible, you know, but it hearkens back to what they used to tell kids, like the parables, the fables, you know, where everything wasn't so sanitized. You know, and Peter Pan wasn't exactly the nice guy.

[00:34:46] So I enjoyed that element in there and I won't go into too many details because that'll give some really nice visual elements away. But mosquitoes were done very, very well. I really appreciated that. Oh, yeah. Those are a particular kind of mosquito, too, which are my swarm nemesis.

[00:35:04] There is a tiger mosquito in Philadelphia that's taken over and they are the terminator of mosquitoes. Those things suck. They're awful. They're terrible. And the mosquitoes I grew up with, I'd get, you know, you get a mosquito

[00:35:16] bite, like, oh, this is uncomfortable and itch for a little bit. And they go away. My body responds to these things terribly and I get these giant welts. And I lived when I lived next to the Wissahickan in the Germantown neighborhood

[00:35:31] of Philadelphia, right by this parkland where the story takes place. I lived on this lot that was wooded and was infested with tiger mosquitoes. And they can breed in about a tablespoon of water.

[00:35:45] They can even lay their eggs in areas that are going to get flooded so they can lay their eggs where there's no water knowing that when it rains during the summer, the rain will hang around long enough for their larva to hatch and develop into

[00:36:00] adult mosquitoes. Just terrifying. And they would swore me every day when I went outside and all my attempts to mitigate them and to trap them didn't work best I could reduce it a little bit. So they entered into this book as their so they're invasive.

[00:36:18] And I should also say that Gally Trotts job, the mushroomites job in the Wissahickan will lands is to protect it from invasive species of flora and fauna that disrupts the natural balance of the ecosystem. So Tiger mosquitoes are on his radar and he's working out a poison to

[00:36:36] rid the world of well, not the world with this particular place of their present. Yeah, yeah, I've got an interesting story with with mosquitoes actually. So I don't they're the only species Tiger Mosquitoes, the only species of mosquitoes that I've ever been bit by. Hmm.

[00:36:54] And OK, we say this jokingly, but there's probably an unfortunate grain of truth to that because I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which if you are not at all familiar Manhattan Project three nuclear power plants. It was the secret city, right?

[00:37:09] So people from Oak Ridge don't get bitten by mosquitoes because we're probably too irradiated. I don't know exactly what it is, but there is some definite truth to people from Oak Ridge do not get bitten by mosquitoes as readily. Yeah.

[00:37:23] But Tiger Mosquitoes are the only ones that will have ever been. So your radiation, they're immune to it. They're that ferocious that they pass through this barrier that you have. I don't know. It's just a weird thing. I mean, they sell t-shirts and in shops in Oak Ridge.

[00:37:41] It's just like, hey, I'm from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I glow in the dark and they're a glow in the t-shirt. So it's a thing. It's a thing. Interesting. That sounds like a very you should tell that story someday because it sounds like a good start to a comic.

[00:37:54] Well, I'm working on the very beginnings of actually telling a story about Oak Ridge because there's so much weirdness to that city and so much interesting stuff that the government did. And yeah, it's a fascinating place for sure. Look at that. Oh, I will. Isn't it amazing?

[00:38:13] Like you get a little when you're just living your life, you get like the little edge of a story. And when you grab it and start pulling on it, you know, like, oh, wow, this connects to the mosquitoes.

[00:38:25] This connects to, you know, the Manhattan Project and all these different things. And it's also your hometown. So your heart's kind of invested in this place too. And so is your biology and who you are. And then all of a sudden you're entrenched in something and you have

[00:38:37] this wonderful sandbox to play in and get inspiration from. Yeah, and it's hard to to separate myself with with my autoimmune condition and what has happened. The reality that that's probably somehow associated with where I'm from. Oh, you know, higher incidence of thyroid disease.

[00:38:57] Yeah, I've told this one before, but we when I was a kid, there was a massive exodus of frogs from the the retention pond. So that so all of the water that comes off the reactor had to be

[00:39:11] captured right in these retention ponds and they were warmer, as you might imagine. Yeah. And then standard ponds around so frogs gravitated to them. So for what one summer day, nobody really knows why they did it. But there was a mass exodus of these frogs.

[00:39:29] So everybody has to wear a little badge that measures the amount of exposure that you've had at the plants or whatever, just for safety. And everybody was driving home, ran over these frogs. So a lot of people like leave their

[00:39:47] hanging lanyard in the car so they don't forget it because you have to have it or they would send you home. So the radiation from the frogs, from people driving over those frogs, set off all of the badges. So all these people came in that day.

[00:40:03] They were like, what is going on? Like there's this crazy high level of exposure. It was the frogs. Oh my god. Byron, I want to read this book. You need to get busy on it. It sounds like you have like a sort of anthology,

[00:40:19] like a Twilight Zone kind of place and pull all these cool little short stories from. Yeah, exactly. It's definitely going to have some supernatural elements to it because the South is just embedded with like tons of really cool mythology and hide into my

[00:40:37] because my actually my anthropology background was specific to studying mythologies of Native American people in North America. So yeah. Oh, you are primed to do this. I like the idea that it's not the Manhattan Project that like is attracting these phenomenon.

[00:40:54] It was like there was stuff there that attracted the Manhattan Project. Exactly. Exactly. So why did we settle three nuclear power plants in this really weird area in Tennessee? And the reality is was fallout. So they're in three separate valleys. So if something did happen and, you know,

[00:41:17] major explosion or whatever, then because of the prevalent winds and everything else, most of it, at least it was perceived would stay within a certain boundary. So. Hmm. Weird city, the whole place was walled in at the beginning. So I think, you know, it's when you start,

[00:41:39] when you start looking at place and environment for inspiration, for stories, the amount of things that come up, I mean, we might be similar in that we have kind of like a holistic environmental lens that we're looking at,

[00:41:51] you know, the ecosystem lens and extending that beyond a natural world into an ecosystem of story, of legend, of people, of place and of incidents. So when you look at somewhere like Philadelphia, it's ripe with story. And if you look at the Whistahickan, it's ripe with story.

[00:42:09] And you could zero in on telling the story of the mushroom species that live there or you could tell the story of the people that live adjacent to the woodlands there or in the city itself. And all of it contains so many different layers.

[00:42:23] All right, let's take a quick break. What in the Sam Hill is happening right now? What is that? What is it? You like bars? Yeah, what is it? Oh, you like band of bars. It's not my fault, you mupple. What? That makes sense.

[00:42:42] They're dropping some great new series right now. There's that one about a heavy metal guitarist in the 1970s with monsters working class wizards. You know how we love monsters around here. And my friend, Dakota Brown, he's working on a project. Grandma Tillie's Hell Tech Mech with Lane Lloyd.

[00:43:00] I saw the preview for that. That is crazy. Jimmy even contributed to their anthology from the static and had Matt Sumo on the podcast to talk about his project, The Bartic Versus, which makes a lot of sense that the project landed there. Yeah, yeah, you are.

[00:43:15] Where can you find them? You need to get out more. They were in previews or you can visit their website, bandofbars.com for all the latest. Can we turn the music off now? Oh, I did. Thank you. No more surprises, minstrels or anything like that.

[00:43:30] Or I'll rent you out to the Renfair as a children's ride. Let's get back to the show. The thing that I kept coming back to in terms of how am I going to describe this to somebody who hasn't read it before? Right.

[00:43:45] And my my adjective and I'm making this up, I think is Lynchian. Right. So David Lynch inspired. Right. Normally, I'd say that's a choice kind of designed to make that that pharaoh feel more detached or alien for my own.

[00:44:01] But it feels like there's more at play because there's there's a moment in the last chapter when when Gally enters a meditative space where the interlune panels don't quite fit with the main narrative. And I don't feel like this is giving anything away necessarily.

[00:44:14] But you've got a glass full of feathers falling off a table with a lemon on it. And to me, these read as an opportunity to kind of create an emotional moment for the reader, picking in some different senses because we get just adjusted

[00:44:29] when we're reading comic books that being this visual medium and how else do we how else do we draw in a reader sensorally? So that felt like a really nice moment for that glass shattering, these buzzing.

[00:44:45] And I guess all of that to say is it gets a little trippy. So it's a little bit hard to ignore, you know, a comparison to the effects of ingesting certain types of mushrooms, full disclosure. I'm someone who has felt the effects of several different types of hallucinogenic

[00:44:59] mushrooms. So I'm not it. I will not judge. You know, is that something you are actively trying to associate and like work into this as an experience for him? Because it was combined with spellcraft in terms of like world. So.

[00:45:18] Well, I guess I'll start by saying it, you know, like I mentioned before, we were talking about story and how you just grab a corner of it and you start tugging and then a whole ecosystem sort of lands on your lap.

[00:45:30] And if this you could say is a story about mushrooms or at least mushrooms in the title, when you look at mushrooms, that's a small little corner and then you tug on it and all this stuff comes with it, all this mythology and then not just mushrooms.

[00:45:47] They're fungi and there's the a larger kingdom of how this organism can express itself in the mushrooms, just a fruiting body for a mycelium network underground or in a tree. And then you have to also consider yeast, which is

[00:46:03] ferment and lives on our skin and in our bodies. And so that's connected into the narrative, too, of what this world is, this kingdom is and what its story is. And also, you know, this kingdom also can speak to humans through chemicals, you know,

[00:46:24] psilocybin mushrooms are very strange and we don't know too much. Well, we're researching more, but the way that mushrooms can speak to human consciousness and personality, but also the brains of other animals and creatures like ants is remarkable and of note.

[00:46:56] So that's something that definitely I thought needed to be assigned into this book, you know, thematically it's going to be linked there. I myself have not done psilocybin mushrooms before. So it doesn't come from my personal experience, though.

[00:47:17] I have done LSD once when I was at about 22 years old, I think. And it really knocked my socks off. I had quite the experience. And it was really it was a really profound experience, but I have not repeated it since I felt like I had

[00:47:35] kind of also in fear that it wouldn't have been as good that I kind of went to the place that I needed to go to and came back. But I might try psilocybin mushrooms at some point in life.

[00:47:46] Who knows, I still have a lot of it, hopefully left to live, so we'll see. But in this book, though, the the trippiness, I guess, for lack of a better word to describe it, is it just like I want to draw like some far out stuff?

[00:48:02] But because I think art itself and I look at myself as an artist first and foremost, can communicate to people across boundaries, but through different methods than conscious awareness. And I believe in the unconscious. I believe personalities are made of parts and we're very complicated.

[00:48:26] And understanding of self is understanding of selves. We have an ecology within each one of us overlaps with the ecologies, with the people that we share our lives and spirits with. And how you can speak to the unconscious, how dreams are processed in the brain,

[00:48:44] how memories are stored in the brain, that's kind of a magical system in the book. Gallitrat himself uses a magical technique where he can kind of read a mind, so to say, but also influence a mind.

[00:48:59] And so there's this give and take of going into a mind or also taking things out of a mind, but because the mind doesn't store information like a book would, it's nonlinear, it's through association juxtaposition, through texture, through smell, you know?

[00:49:14] And so he'll get back out of a creature's mind sort of a pieces of art kind of a surreal tableau. And his gift is kind of reading those tea leaves. And then if he were to impress on a creature's mind to try to influence them

[00:49:29] and maybe calm someone down or something, you might not be projecting the words calm into a creature's mind. It might be imagery, it could be sounds. And so that was sort of thematically where I was going with some of the non sequiturs in the book that seem

[00:49:48] surreal, that they're entrenched in the language of the unconscious. And that gives the reader a their own kind of interpretation of what's actually happening with these events. And I have my interpretation, you know, when I'm drawing them,

[00:50:09] I do have a sense of like this is the impact of what I think is being expressed. But when I'm going back to like this book is probably a mystery part of the mystery. And I guess the Lynchian kind of connection would be it is, you know,

[00:50:23] subjectively your relationship with this art matters and how you take those symbols in is Gallitra speaking to you and kind of going into your unconscious. And that's a valid way of enjoying the story outside of just the very literal plot of what's happening. That's it. OK.

[00:50:46] Yeah, I made any sense. No, no, it made it made a ton of sense. Like, oh, I want to I want to go back and now like reread this with this overly. I almost want to I want an appendix. I want more information.

[00:50:59] But maybe maybe that's not the point. And that's why I think the ending was fascinating for me. And my own experience of it was, OK, there's clearly more to tell. I know of people, but if people are expecting a standard point of punctuation,

[00:51:14] punctuation, right? Like a lot of times, I think when we're trying to tell something about ecology or the earth or to get people to feel more connected and disconnect with social media and all these other things that vie for our

[00:51:29] time and attention and really suck up a lot of our lives. You're not going to get necessarily hope, right? Because I think that's the overriding thing that people tend to want to leave people with. Like, OK, this looks bad, but here's hope, right?

[00:51:47] Like, hold on to this nugget. And that piece of punctuation wasn't there for me. And I can see how that might be frustrating to somebody. But what would you like to leave the reader of a mushroom night with ultimately or is what you're saying?

[00:52:05] Hey, what you get out of this makes me happy. Oh, like what they get out of it as far as a message or like a some meaning? Well, yeah, again, going back to so if I could use

[00:52:20] Harry Potter, maybe since a lot of people understand it as a comparison, you have I think the first book was the Sorcerer's Stone. Yeah, so you could say that that's the first book and I don't know if when she wrote it,

[00:52:39] she knew she was going to have more volumes or not. But it kind of tells the story of, I guess, Harry Potter goes to school and he finishes his first year at school and stuff happens. But of course, there's like Voldemort is still out there and undefeated.

[00:52:52] So there's more to go. But this is like also its own book. So that's what I'm working on right now. And that is split into three volume. So my Sorcerer's Stone is coming out in three installments. And whether or not, you know,

[00:53:07] it'll keep going where we'll have to see. But it'll get to a point where maybe Voldemort's still out there. But we have some degree of closure for Lemon Galley Trot in this adventure that they're having. So as far as the message goes, it's kind of hard because, yes,

[00:53:26] if, you know, if destiny heads in a certain direction, there are some concepts that I am hungry to explore. And they're difficult concepts, you know, in the in the beginning of chapter two,

[00:53:43] you just see as in a banner in the background and in and in that plays a substantial role in the series, death, but life persists. That, I think, is a very, very difficult sentence and very important death, but life persists.

[00:54:04] And I guess to circle it to the environmental crisis that a lot of people have a lot of different levels of despair around. Yeah. I think what you have to enter into with dealing like concepts like that is almost a black belt level of spirituality, of wisdom and

[00:54:37] for lack of a better paradigm, a connection to a source of light, a source of words are failing. I'll have to revert to my art. But in order to grapple with things like that,

[00:54:57] and I can't quite get, I think, to a black belt in just these three volumes. Got you there. So right now, I think we're going to be stuck in the riddle aspect of the journey of death, but life persists and how as a.

[00:55:19] That's sort of the initial trauma of life is that it ends. And that happens, whether it's an environmental crisis or time just comes for you. You know, it happens and how you find meaning in the light of that original

[00:55:37] trauma is kind of to me, I guess, one of the base foundations of our human spiritual journey. And that is tied into the mushroom night of what these characters. Ideally, if I have enough time to tell their story, we'll we'll be processing on a much more complete level.

[00:56:01] But for now, I'll say death, but life persists is the riddle. OK. Well, one thing that I got stuck on my brain just kept ruminating back on it's a critical flight. I'm pronouncing that correctly. So I tried to Google that. It's the title of the last chapter,

[00:56:20] also part of OK, I'll call it a spell that Raleigh is is performing. OK, tell me what is a critical is a critical? Yes, that's right. Flight flight. What is that? So going back to the idea that these two worlds,

[00:56:40] the world of the fairies or the gnomes, whatever you want to call them, and the world of humans are overlapping, they're sort of vibrating on a different frequency, but they both inhabit the same environment.

[00:56:51] And as the story goes on, we'll see a bit more of what the rules are behind that, how that came about. But they're separated by a barrier. An acyclic flight is a way to puncture through that barrier so that you can make

[00:57:11] a connection from the immaterial world, maybe to the physical world. Might be like a way to look at it. And it's something that Gowley studies in order to find Lemuel. So they they meet at the beginning of the story in part ways, and he kind of

[00:57:33] takes something from her that's important and needs to return it to her. And he feels obligated to do so. So he starts studying this technique and it's kind of a dangerous form of spiritual teleportation is probably a good way to describe it.

[00:57:46] So imagine it from the human perspective is like, OK, I want to enter into a fey kingdom outside of our dimension. Maybe we use some sort of non sort of whimsical scientific technology to dissolve your body and send your particles out into whatever experience

[00:58:04] you're going to have, or maybe you take suicide in mushrooms. And that's how you wind up getting there. That's your acyclic flight. This is coming from the perspective of the fairy. So if you were to take suicide in mushrooms and meet spirits or parts of your

[00:58:21] personality that are disembodied from your sense of self, that are manifesting as little mushroom people or something like that. What if one of those little mushroom people wanted to come find you after the fact? What would they have to do to go get to you and get integrated?

[00:58:34] So it's a flight through the isochris. And there is a sort of a spiritual biome to this book, kind of its own ecology and so terms like Clontaclugin and the isochris and acryon will be. Because I think that stuff's interesting.

[00:58:55] It's kind of my own little spiritual pantheon will be expounded upon later in in the volumes to come. Very cool. Well, this is just my get to know Oliver a little bit. Your your website tells me you're into archery. I love it.

[00:59:12] Although my autoimmune condition where you know, UV tries to kill me. Provide to me from getting outside to shoot. I've got to find an indoor range somewhere maybe. But I have like a replica Mongolian era recurve bow that's Oh, no. Yeah, you're good. You're good.

[00:59:27] A little more than like 80 pounds of standard draw. Yeah, which has definitely got some punch. Anyway, how'd you get into it? I want to be. Oh, well, I mean, your bow isn't just hanging out by that bookshelf by any chance. Is it? It is not. OK, all right.

[00:59:43] Well, I won't make you go fetch it. Wow. So I'll send you a picture. Yeah, yeah, that would be I would love to eventually so I have a takedown recurve bow but having like Scythian or Mongolian style bow. I think they are so interesting and so

[00:59:58] like they're such a beautiful design that they will they will be in the mushroom night eventually something like similar to it just because. I prefer that style to like an English long bow or something. But have you how to get into archery was

[01:00:12] I think I was drawn to it as a remedy for anxiety because there's sort of a stillness of mind that I feel is required and probably a lot of archers would agree. To and also just a stillness of mind that comes from doing it because it is

[01:00:33] very relaxing. And when I even talked about like mushroom hunting, being a source of meditation, you know, I'm my mind's very active. I used to have a lot of anxiety. I'm on the other side of that now and it's

[01:00:48] I get like little pop ups every now and then, but they close out and are less dominating my moods as they used to be. So a lot of my hobby is revolved around soothing to a certain degree in things that were probably soothing to me.

[01:01:02] But archery is really it's really hard to explain unless you've done it. But I think it's addictive. Like if you if you have a friend come over and they and they use your bow, I think just when the arrow

[01:01:22] whips out of your fingers, you know, and the sound of it and the feel of it and the like the whack is it like hits a target and you can sense the power of like the instrument launching this thing

[01:01:39] and how your body eventually learns on its own how to aim. Kind of, you know, you can think about a lot, but you make all these little micro adjustments with your muscles that you're thinking about but not thinking

[01:01:53] about and it opens up, I don't know, a communication between parts of yourself through this instrument to be able to redirect a wooden rod, you know, however many yards into an exact place that you want it to go.

[01:02:08] And it's there's a there was a great club, the P.D. Archer Club out near the Wissahick in a park. I don't think it's part of the Wissahick in Parklands back in Philadelphia. My wife and I were members of

[01:02:23] there was a lovely outdoor range that they had, you know, just stationary targets set up in kind of like a gorge area. You had like this big sort of rocky crag that apparently was during the Revolutionary War where they practice

[01:02:42] I guess a troop of infantry would practice shooting there because the stone helped muffle the the sounds of the guns going off. But now they have stationary targets there, but they also have a range that you can

[01:02:55] kind of hike through and they'll have handing targets and stuff like that. So you can kind of go feel like you're Robin Hood or something going through the woods, firing at the I shouldn't say fire, but losing your eyes at the different targets. So it's getting outside again.

[01:03:10] That's probably another connection to although I've I've done archery indoors as well. Well, I have to look it up for you and get it to you because the place I bought my bow is actually in Tacoma. So oh wow.

[01:03:23] Fancy that. Yeah, that would be worth a field trip up if they have an open. Do they have an open shop? They do. Oh, cool. They used to be anyway. Obviously now I can't guarantee I've had that thing for eight, nine years at least. So yeah.

[01:03:39] Yeah, really cool stuff though. They do not just Mongolian replica, but Scythian several other like there's a whole gamut of stuff. It's just a really, really neat place. Wow. Well, thanks for the thanks for the heads up.

[01:03:52] Unfortunately, when you wind up drawing a comic, it starts eating into all your fun hobby timing, just wind up drawing for hours on end. But you daydream about, you know, when a deadline will finish what you're

[01:04:03] going to do, so maybe we'll take a trip up to Tacoma and do a little bow shopping. Nice. Well, I usually ask people what else they got cooking, but I think it's pretty clear what else you're working on at the moment.

[01:04:14] So yeah, for the foreseeable future right now, I'm going to be trucking through this. I'm putting the finishing touches on volume two right now and then immediately starting volume three. OK, awesome. Well, congrats with the publishing company that you're working with because they're awesome.

[01:04:32] Madcave is phenomenal, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I say this quite readily, but there's nobody else who's doing a better job of like that I feel like taking care of their creators because obviously people

[01:04:47] talk and everybody that I have encountered who has had a book with them or if they don't they want to do a book with them. They're just really easy to work with. They're great people. So yeah, you're in good hands. Oh, I feel that I have heard,

[01:05:05] you know, I'm very new to comics. Like I said, I've been working sometimes animations a bit comic adjacent and I've been tabling at cons off and on for a while. But through what rumblings, what fingers I do have in that soil,

[01:05:22] I always hear good things about Madcave and my own personal experience. I've man, what a great team of people they have there. They have so much love for the art form and so much trust for their artists and they also have so much bravery and courage.

[01:05:36] You know, the mushroom night I will admit is a weird book. Like it's kind of you look at the covering like us. It's like a mushroom guy in a frog. It's like you kind of think you know what it's about and then you open up.

[01:05:46] Like, what the heck? This was really weird. And they read that and they liked it and they've they've been so enthusiastic about my ideas and encouraging that I just have nothing but really great things to say and gratuity in my heart for the opportunity to work for them.

[01:06:05] Well, where can people find you online? I know you are not the biggest fan of social media, which I totally understand. Yeah, it's something that I need to work with because it is helpful if you're selling a book to sell your book.

[01:06:20] I am on Instagram at all over by the just all over by my handle there. And I'm slowly working on a sub stack as well that I should launch. Hopefully before the book comes out in the next week or two. So I'm working on my first post there.

[01:06:36] So those would be a little sort of letters that will hopefully come out monthly that will update people on. But I'm not really interested in Twitter, TikTok or some of those other things at the moment. Maybe at some point I will.

[01:06:49] But there's so many things to do with your time and those things just don't really speak to you know, I guess. Hey, stay in the artist lane. I think I think you're doing yourself a favor by like just shutting a lot of that

[01:07:04] stuff out. Well, thanks for the encouragement. It can be a little toxic. I mean, I know it's challenging because you have to promote, right? It's just the nature of the beast. But at the same time, it can suck a lot of your time. And it and it's not

[01:07:21] emotionally, I don't think really good for a lot of artists. You know, it's just a vehicle for toxicity in a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be at all. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of we are children in this new era of the

[01:07:37] internet and how we're relating and stuff like that. I kind of hope that there's going to be a lot more compassion demonstrated on these forums in the future. And I'm hopeful that there will be. But at the moment, yeah, I mean, it seems that

[01:07:51] when you don't have a person sitting in front of you, it's a lot easier to deny their own humanity and just see your own unreconsiled projections like that. That's this kind of icky. And I also like the idea when artists were kind of

[01:08:06] you didn't really know who they were and you just like kind of chilled with their stuff. I liked kind of seeing the picture of the artist on the dust jacket. Who is this person? There's some mystique there that I think is nice and that mystique is called a

[01:08:21] boundary and having them, I think in life throughout the natural world, the spiritual world, the psychological world are all good, good, healthy, useful things to have. 100 percent could not agree more. Well, the Mushroom Knight is a unique debut. I'm going to say it's a very unique debut.

[01:08:42] Yeah, well, it's a quirky blend of these familiar fantasy elements, you know, but reimagining them in almost like a Guillermo del Toro fashion, right? Where they simultaneously pull at our heart strings in ways that are also

[01:08:57] uniquely foreign and it's OK if they're also a little unsettling at times, because that's life. And I really appreciated the philosophical lens that you used to look at how we as humanity interact with and are interconnected with the natural world. I highly recommend people picking this up

[01:09:16] because it's the kind of project that sticks with you. You know, like I guarantee you I read through the whole thing a couple of days ago and I keep coming back around and I was like, OK, OK, well, that's interesting.

[01:09:27] It's one of those books that that makes you think and and you will come back to and again, I'm going to do a reread now just because I have more information in that that's really, really cool. So remind me it's hitting shelves when exactly?

[01:09:40] Because I know release schedules are a little crazy. Oh, let me double check. It's March. I want to say March 5th, but I should actually Google in my own book right now to see when it is coming out.

[01:09:52] You're not the first person to ever do that, trust me. I'm almost if it's not March, March 5th. Yes, awesome. All right. Well, Oliver, thanks so much for hanging out with me today. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, that was great, Byron.

[01:10:04] Thank you for hosting me and your beautiful podcast. This was lovely. Well, thank you so much. This is Byron O'Neill on behalf of all of us at Comic Book Getty. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time. Take care, everybody.

[01:10:15] This is Byron O'Neill, one of your hosts of the Cryptid Creator Corner, brought to you by Comic Book Getty. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of our podcast. Please rate, review, subscribe, all that good stuff.

[01:10:28] It lets us know how we're doing and more importantly, how we can improve. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of the Cryptid Creator Corner, maybe you would enjoy our sister podcast into the comics Kate. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.