Ryan K. Lindsay talks Deer Editor

[00:00:00] Your ears do not deceive you.

[00:00:02] You've just entered the cryptid creator corner brought to you by your friends at Comic Book Yeti.

[00:00:07] So without further ado, let's get on to the interview.

[00:00:10] Yay!

[00:00:13] Yay!

[00:00:15] Yes, I can clearly see that I rolled a one.

[00:00:18] Oh my God!

[00:00:20] Ugh.

[00:00:21] While the Yeti determines my faith, I wanted to tell you about our friends at Sanity Damage.

[00:00:26] They're an amazing D&D actual play live show. sucked in because this is just one hell of a weird concept, you know. My impression after reading the first issue is it's got a real fresh take on, you know, all these classic no no art things we had come to associate with no are embraces everything we know and love about detective fiction. And it's got this uniquely stylized way to go about doing it. And that

[00:01:41] that uniquely stylized way is what takes it over the top. So let me set the stage.

[00:02:42] the three issues sort of mini series story. And yeah, it's been sort of percolating along with,

[00:02:46] we'd always wanted to collect and trade

[00:02:49] because we love this story.

[00:02:51] There's just something,

[00:02:52] it's just sort of, I think it just intersects

[00:02:54] with a lot of things that Sami and I like

[00:02:56] and that's sort of like crime and strangeness

[00:03:01] and, you know, an intriguing lead character.

[00:03:05] Like we have with Bucky, this amazing comic creator and artist in his own right. And we're just goofing off and I was like, oh yeah, it'd be like somebody writing in Dear Editor to a magazine. And literally just instantly, I think I followed it up with a second tweet where I was like, just legally getting in here

[00:04:20] and shotgunning the title Dear Editor

[00:04:22] because I wanna make this into something.

[00:04:25] And it all just spawned from there. hours in the day of a newsroom sort of thing as to this big, so like I think it was a shooting case makes the front page. Awesome film. And I remember watching that as a teen, a young teen and just being like, Oh man, I want to work in a newsroom. I want this. I think this would be so cool. And so I've always been a sucker for a newsroom story. So when the Redditor kind of mashed together, I just knew I had to do it.

[00:05:41] It was, it was too fun to pass up.

[00:05:45] Okay.

[00:05:45] Okay.

[00:05:46] I hear in my head, I was thinking, this of go, oh, I can see what his biggest problem or issue is. And it's kind of his, it's his best attribute as well. It's how sort of headstrong he is and get out of your own head. And so for me that would be it would be that and I guess it would be you know like hunters with long range sniper rifles because I'm pretty certain that deer don't like them as well so they would they would or just headlights I guess somebody could just shine a bright light at Bucky and that mine might really stump him.

[00:08:20] Which I don't believe is a gag replay at all across the three issues. all of these things. And as the creator, your job is to make sure that everything out of their purview is what's swirling and swerving and is about to sort of trip them over. And so being able to add just lots of like slowly revealed world building elements was definitely the sort of

[00:11:02] inspiration that I wanted to take. There also, you know, going back to time, a lawyer, I found that comic such an interesting inspiration because it was often, I think, all the initial issues of that book were flip issues. So there were two covers and there were two stories and one would be a bit more of a sort of hard noir story and one would really really steer into that sort of noir Aesthetic and so that was a really fun like conscious choice to go out. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna draw from That sub genre and I really want to explore which is why we made it that He's visually not really played as a gag in the book either like it's people like he just exists with

[00:12:23] With all the other humans and at this stage Yeah. And you know, after forgive me here, you know, I've got my Western aesthetic peaking in, but I just don't typically associate noir so much, you know, with that part of the world. So does, is there a blueprint? Is there an aesthetic, you know, that sneaks its way in that's expressing some of those

[00:13:41] cultural things that are definitively, you know, Australia, Oce like, noir western. And it's just so, it's just so open and so bleak in its colours and in its landscapes. Or the other way we go is we go suburban. And so if we look at, I think the two films, I looked at that and I say for that was Chopper, which is an Eric Banner film from,

[00:15:02] I guess we were 20 years ago now,

[00:15:04] where he plays a notorious

[00:15:05] at a real life Australian film like Two Hands, which was an early Heath Ledger film, the main sort of criminal, who's by Brian Brown, who's an amazing Australian actor, his character is this suburban dad.

[00:16:23] He's also a mini criminal overlord, but you also see him spending time at home in a very It looked at the CD Underbelly of Sydney and it showed all the people, the gangsters, the mobsters that, you know, wearing suits, flashing money, nice cars. So I guess it happens in one or two cities. And then beyond that where there is still crime, it's just so very, it's so very different, so very suburban, because it's not even kind of like rural. We don't seem to have a lot of that.

[00:17:42] I mean, we have a lot of rural space,

[00:17:43] but when we think of crime stories,

[00:17:45] they seem to become suburban.

[00:17:46] And I think that that's really cool. performances of all time. He's so good in it. He's so hilarious and yet so menacing and so strange. Films like that I love to see get a wider, wider spread. So yeah, whatever links we can give. I will do it. So I'll be in it a bit of Australian crime. I'm all for it. Yeah, me too. Sounds great. Well, I love in here there's a kind of delicious mixture of different

[00:19:04] periods of time. I'm anthropologist at heart, they feel so organic and lived in. Everything balances and everything fits and everything matches and everything meets. His design sense is so superb. I mean, I'd like Bucky is literally just dressed as

[00:20:24] Robert Redford in All the President's Men. That was the character sheet I had sent. that our brains work differently between the screen and between paper. There are cognitive switching going on. And so I think a character like Bucky, who probably is a bit old school in his approach, is going to retain some of that old school element, which again, then also speaks to his mild closed mindedness as well, in certain ways, which is also then Law character arc I found a bit strange but I won't spoil the ending. But it was really cool but the aesthetic of the film, I consciously noted that all the cars like the same, I'm not a car guy so let's just say before, I teach older teenagers, I teach English at a college, and I love having discussions with them about how do we present ourselves.

[00:24:22] Because some people don't want to spend money on clothes world and he does that page, it just, it just comes through as real. That's what I always get from Sammy's work. It just comes through as real. And for a story about a dear man who's somehow rising the journalistic ranks at his newspaper, and it's so stupid, I wanted everything else to feel real. And so I think, yes, Sammy,

[00:25:42] Sammy absolutely made that pop. So I will give all credit to him as I should.

[00:26:45] over a decade now, probably about 11, 12 years on various projects. And we've done straight crime with Chum at a comics tribe.

[00:26:50] We've done some very funky sci-fi with Everfrost at Black Mask.

[00:26:56] And then we also did a Black Mask beautiful canvas,

[00:26:58] which is kind of like this crime sci-fi hybrid.

[00:27:01] And every genre where we come out together,

[00:27:04] he just manages to like invent a whole new world.

[00:27:07] And then for every moment, I go to, my banner is bucky behind me. And people are constantly like, who's that? I need to know more. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. And it means I hope, but for the instant interest it draws from people,

[00:28:21] I hope I've backed a story up that actually warrants them

[00:28:25] then plonking down cash and wanting to spend an afternoon

[00:28:28] reading it. on the podcast to talk about his project, The Bardic Versus, which makes a lot of sense that the project landed there. Where can you find them? You need to get out more. They are in previews or you can visit their website bandabars.com for all the latest. Can we turn the music off now? Thank you. No more surprises, minstrels or anything like that or I'll rent

[00:29:44] you out to the Renfaire as a children initially gone black and white mostly because like the jewel raisin of like, well, obviously it's like,

[00:31:02] it's quicker because you don't have to do color.

[00:31:06] I'm way lazy.

[00:31:06] And also it's a very noir story. fourth is to what that exact color and shade would be. And whenever we get into that portion of the discussion, basically, I just keep hitting reply or going, yeah, I'll back Sammy to the hilt. That's there, my notes. Sammy's like, he's such a meticulous genius. He knows exactly what he

[00:32:23] wants. He knows like how to get it. He knows and they were changed up between them. So I was like totally stoked to do that and then as as Lauren asks, gorgeous work just starts coming through. I was like yeah we we made the right choice completely. from works incredibly hard and is so, I don't wanna use the word easy to deal with. It's like, it's a delightful creative relationship. There's back and forth, there's taking of notes, there's giving of notes,

[00:35:00] and there's like smashing every single deadline.

[00:35:03] Like everything just sort of comes across communications.

[00:35:05] Great, like, you know, I'm so aware of what I can't do.

[00:36:21] Cause I can't letter and I can't draw, I can't color.

[00:36:24] I can't even put together on that time. So no, I appreciate it. Thank you, Ann. Yeah. Well, in terms of, I'm trying to get a perspective of exactly what we're going to get,

[00:37:40] because in terms of the whole link, so we started we're gonna get three issues worth of that. So whatever that adds up to 72 story papers. And I've just been proofing the trade collection and it'll have some back matter and pinups and stuff like that. I know when I ran the Kickstarter's,

[00:39:01] I had a bunch of amazing friends that did like pinups

[00:39:05] of Bucky or the D-Rhetater world that we would use there. I guess two spaces for this. One is the formalist approach and one is the kind of obtuse approach. So with that formalist aspect of things, as a reader and then as a creator, I find comics really interesting in how constraining it is. I kind of love the structure of it.

[00:40:21] And I often say that a page is like a son at Niamic pentameter.

[00:40:27] It's got to have just that on top of those page turns,

[00:41:40] every second page turn was even bigger,

[00:41:44] especially the fourth one, I guess you would say, don't necessarily think about at all. Brothers writers don't think about the page turn and they just sort of like feel scenes however they want to with their words. So I think comics has a mild advantage with that point, which is kind of cool. So I definitely covered it from that side, but then the other side is this sort of obtuse angle, which is,

[00:43:01] and this is probably for a lot of my work,

[00:43:04] I want the reader to have to kind of think

[00:43:06] and figure it out sometimes. name every character and every issue and in real life, we don't often tell each other around names in conversation. Like, I know there's certain things you have to do, but I don't like to have too much exposition. So I've kind of consciously swerved, like, and I've always kind of done this to my detriment or not. Less exposition, like, have the reader

[00:44:21] spend some time going, wait, okay, what you will. I really like that. I really like the opportunity to go, oh, I think I can see what's being layered here. And it gives me a chance to participate. Whereas if you watch a lot of, I won't name any specific franchise or multinational corporate billionaire type companies.

[00:45:43] This is more than one,

[00:45:45] but often they will like spell every single thing out It's this weird story of two sisters who spend years of fighting and dueling over the family dragon that they they they harbor and look after because one wants to use the dragon from nefarious criminal stuff and one wants to use it in a more naturalistic way And so we end up with this like kung fu kind of like midnight showdown in this very very strange sort of like almost grindhouse

[00:48:04] comics tribe, the published Atala James was like, look, it'd be great if we could have a little bit of this backstory. And I was like, cool, let's have a double page splash with just the information.

[00:48:07] Let's just introduce the characters by into the emotion. And then I'll just say, you know,

[00:48:12] here's the situation, and then we'll get back to the character story, because that's always

[00:48:16] what interests me more. I love to build a world,. And I was totally happy to put the info kind of crawl on the page. I think it's quite a nifty little thing. It's another tool that it's always fun to play with something. But ultimately, I'm like, well, now in a detective story, let's say, we don't need to have it to this year and it's this city

[00:49:40] and Mayor Jackson has been doing this for five years. Well, that's not what the reader

[00:49:45] needs. The reader needs to come in and discover this world in the way that Bucky discovers Yes. Sorry, my mic was some for some reason muted. I got weird. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was great because you comics and have that ability to make you buy into something that with pros you would never buy into as suddenly, right? Yeah.

[00:51:00] You got this big deer guy on the front cover.

[00:51:02] Well, if you pick it up and you buy it, you know what you're going to get.

[00:51:05] So you don't need to fill in everything else, right? things. And we were doing, I want to say it was like a newspaper page or something. And so I was writing this little byline and I basically came up with what would be the origin story for Bucky, like the origin of the corporation and the experimenting with like animal hybrids. And I was as I was doing it, I was like, this is where Bucky came from. There you go. I knew I'd figure it out eventually. But right now for the story like line from his senior editor or some stupid shit like that. Well, I'm trying to get a perspective, his comics are now a global, you know, integrative medium, right? And I'm trying to get a perspective of what the market looks like there.

[00:53:41] I've got, you know, a few Aussie comics,

[00:53:43] creator friends, they kind of keep me a little bit

[00:53:46] in touch with it, But I'm just kind of curious what your feeling is in terms of just the barriers to the market as somebody who is Australian and trying to get their work out there. Yeah, definitely. I think it's an element there is just that sort of distance

[00:55:00] which even though it has been broached a lot

[00:55:02] by the internet and social media,

[00:55:05] I'm certainly very creators that I was coming up with. I saw Ed Brisson was on this show just like a week ago. He's a feller. I've known since way back when and he's been so supportive and so lovely. So there's people like him, Christopher Sabella was a guy and you way back when. And so when I turned up in Seattle, he was

[00:56:24] so lovely to be like, oh, Brian, I'm going to be unable to do that from Australia, it actually is, it does make it, I think, a decent barrier. But when I look at the people that have managed to get across and start work, when I think about people like Nicola Scott, who's, I think last thing was, I forget the full title, but one of the Amazonian Wonder Woman books with Kelly

[00:57:44] Sridiconic, Tom Taylor, obviously, who like, oh maybe I shouldn't go. And to her full credit she was like absolutely not. You've been building up to go across, you've been getting stuff together, you've been writing scripts, you're going to have your first comic printed and ready. She was like, it'll be fine. Go. We didn't realize that the birth would be very late. So instead of me leaving

[00:59:02] like a one-on-the-hold, I left like an 11 I often felt like they were kind of left alone. And I don't know if that's an Australian shyness, not wanting to bother. I think we still, you know, we walk a path behind America, but I think we still have these British roots in us where

[01:00:23] we don't want to bother. We don't want to be in the way. We don't know. I think some of it's like opportunity. I think a lot of it is like, you know, it's luck in the way that luck is opportunity meets preparation. So if I look at like Tom Taylor as like probably our most successful writer in the comics field,

[01:01:43] he got really lucky to land Colin Wilson to draw his first comic, but also it wasn't just blind, I've always managed to tell stories that I really love and I'm really personal and passionate about so that in itself is like a huge win But then I also feel like an absolute hack and I'm certain that these opportunities will dry up at any moment but ten years in They haven't yet. So I sort of find I feel a bit lucky But I'm hoping that that luck is that I just perhaps put in a lot of hard work before an

[01:03:03] Opportunity arose, you know, so yeah, it's tricky. Yeah, yeah, hundred percent

[01:04:05] everybody. So, well, I'll back that up. I really like working with Mad Cave. I've worked with enough publishers that I like to know what I like and Mad Cave are just like they're

[01:04:11] good to deal with. I've quite enjoyed. I did Speed Republic with them two years ago, Emmanuel

[01:04:18] Pahrskandolo illustrated that one and it was this high-octane like car race, character

[01:04:24] exploration story. It was awesome. It was so my phone. And so between that and Sami and I, bullshitting back and forth to then bringing in Lauren, bringing in Jim, Camilla on on letters, my initial editor Dan Hill is like one of my longest friends in comics. And then getting Chaz, who was the guy I knew before,

[01:05:42] and it's been a joy to work with him and then to have Chris as you know, I'm sure you know enough creators where you know we all kind of talk in the app channel, we're like, oh, watch out for this publishing deal, watch out for this or that. The amount of the discussions I've had where I'm like, Matt Kay is good, yeah, and other people are like, yeah, yeah, it's good. And you're always like, all right, we're on the same page? Yeah, yeah, we are. This is like, they got a good deal or they got good people or they got good PR or

[01:07:01] they got good like everything going on. So yeah, it'll be next month. I forget either. I'm gonna say mid-late Feb and then same for March. And then some stage in I'm pretty certain it's in May. So I guess I'm gonna be hitting solicit's maybe solicit's are up this week. I'm clearly not very good at my job, but I'm sure it's coming.

[01:08:22] Yeah, but I know the book we had in May and then yeah, it'll be like

[01:09:26] Well, I publicly went on record already saying this is probably going to end up being one of my favorites of the year that I'm going to be talking about on our award show at the

[01:09:29] end of the year.

[01:09:30] And Jimmy, the other co-host was just a little bit mad that I got to talk to you and he didn't.

[01:09:34] Jimmy's a dude though.

[01:09:36] Jimmy's solid.

[01:09:38] I got all the time on the web with Jimmy.

[01:09:40] Okay.

[01:09:41] Well, I'll let him know that.

[01:09:42] Then you guys can talk food as he tends to do for a long time. write my brain right now and I can put it into harder work. So you can definitely check me out at my site, get the newsletter which goes out maybe two or three times a month, tells you what I'm up to or what I'm reading or what I'm writing. So hopefully people dig it. It always seems to be a bit of a therapy perch for me to put it down and send it out into the world. So I always appreciate

[01:11:02] that as well. Yeah. Well, I'll sometimes you're only gonna reach one person, but if you do, that's a win. So I'm all for it. The low bar I give myself just to get through each day. I can feel that 100% given my lupus condition. Yeah, I'm down, I'm down. All right. Well, Ryan, thanks for hanging out with me on the show today.

[01:12:21] It's been a lot of fun.

[01:12:22] Appreciate it.

[01:12:23] No, man, I've had a blast.

[01:12:25] Thank you so much for having me on.

[01:12:26] It was a very cool way to wind down my holidays.