Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Isla Ruby, and I'm here with Adam Barnhardt, and he is the creator of Macabre Mel and also of the Riot verse and the Shit show comics. Yes, he's here to talk about his new Kickstarter.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Yes, hopefully. I mean, we'll see where the conversation goes. I'm well versed in potatoes, snacks, Kickstarter. I'm not really I'm more well versed in potatoes than Kickstarters, but yeah, let's see where the conversation goes.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: But what about a Kickstarter about potatoes? Do you think there is, like, a conversation there?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Potato man. Yeah, I could make that work. Steak fry boy. We can make something work.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: I would totally read that, but only if it came with free samples.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Okay, I might try working on that.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Okay. So do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and kind of introduce yourself to listeners who don't know you?
This is kind of an indie comic, but you've also worked with Scout Comics to make this happen or to make previous iterations of the Riot verse happen. So who are you?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Like you said, my name is Adam Barnard.
I write all day long. I don't know how I got here. I don't know why I do it, but by day I write as an entertainment journalist for ComicBook.com, and then by night I'm trying to make something out of this comics career, if you could call it that. For whatever reason, I came up with the idea of Shit show probably five years ago, and I started pitching it around and Scout Comics bit before that. I don't think I did a few comics works here and there, just like short stories that haven't even seen the light of day. The only place they exist is on my hard drive.
But I did those. And then I decided, you know what, it would be cool to go after this one idea, which eventually ended up as shit show. And I pitched that around to some publishers, and Scout Comics wanted it to join their family, and I don't know why, but they did. And now we're here. It's snowballed. Since there's all sorts of stuff, my mind never stops wandering. So once I got that email from Scout, I'm like, okay, well, now we're cooking. It's kind of like this sense of validation. You can write all you want, but to have someone say, hey, we will publish this and send it to comic shops for you, that's like, okay, let's see what this comics writing thing can do. And so far I was going to say it hasn't let me down, but anything in life will both let you down and excite you at the same time.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Now, I think I saw an interview with you where you talked about that comics weren't always your thing. Initially, I think one of your parents had a comic book collection they had been collecting for you, and you said no, and my heart broke for that.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Because yes, I know that feeling.
Yeah, no, that's exactly it.
When myself and my two siblings were born, my parents would started collecting something else for us. And the idea is, once we got of age, they would then gift us that collection so we could start a collection of our own. I know my dad was huge into international beer cans at one point, which is apparently a huge thing around the world. He would travel to Germany and all sorts of places, and apparently there's like a Comic con for beer started collecting. He still does collect all sorts of stuff. So my collection was comic books. And I know growing up, he was like, don't really touch the comic books. I'm a kid. I don't know, it's just paper to me. But eventually for my twelveTH or 13th birthday, I think. So this was before the MCU made superheroes into the most popular thing on the face of the planet. My dad's like, okay, you could finally read the comic books. The comics are yours. And I'm like, but they're comic books. I don't think I'll get a girlfriend if I'm reading comic books.
And then Iron Man came out like two years later, and comic books became the biggest thing and the coolest thing.
But yeah, no, I always ask him for if I could still have the collection. And he's like, no, you pissed that chance away. And I'm regretful every single time I think about it because it has all sorts. First Wolverine, all sorts of early Incredible Hulk, Captain America, like the entire first volume of Captain Marvel, the maybe I'm in his will.
Maybe it's will. I mean, I love the band, so I don't want him to depart us, but yeah, it's fun.
That's what's so cool.
Both my parents my mom always tells me how I don't even know her age. I probably even shouldn't say her age.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: In no, no, she's forever younger.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Yes, she always says, how many blankety blank year olds watch this Marvel stuff? And she has a good point, but that's where I get most of my news. She's in tune. She reads the people magazines of the world.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: If TMZ breaks something, she'll text it to me. And should we should probably write about.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: That or something before push alerts. Your mom will send it.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: She is the all things entertainment, and she keeps in tune with everything.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Now, what did your siblings get? You mentioned the suit collections. Were there pogs? Was that part of.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Pogs was a huge part of my childhood.
I'm not sure if it's a regional I had pods.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: I'm very well versed in pods.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: Did you have a so? It was it's hard to department is it a department store? I don't know what to call. Our little town had Ben Franklin's, it was called.
And for whatever reason, by the gum and the candy and stuff, they would have like on the bottom shelf. They just had a box of Pogs.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Oh, that's fun.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: And we always went to Ben Franklin's. It's the type of store I always tell people this, and I'm not sure if they get it. It's the type of store that has a popcorn machine. When you walk in the door, does that portray a certain vibe, like an Ace Hardware or something like yeah, like.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: I think I know what you mean. It certainly invokes a smell, the popcorn and everything. I can imagine what you're talking yeah.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: So we would always go down to the Ben Franklin's, and whenever I don't know if we mowed a yard or raked a yard, or if we came across the quarter in the couch, we would go by I'm dating myself. I feel like I'm talking like it was the 1950s or something, when it was 1996.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: I mean, I lived that. So I understand this is very relevant to me, but apparently this is all oldies now. You'll find stuff from 96 on. Classic rock. So I don't know exactly.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Collection wise. My brother got sports cards, which are making a huge resurgence now, especially, like, Pokemon and all that stuff. And then my sister just regular books, I think. Just novels.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Gotcha that's awesome.
Was it Iron Man then that finally made you make the jump to actually liking the comics? So you rejected the comic books. What was the first one you bought, if you can remember?
[00:08:38] Speaker B: I should go back and say, he let me read comics growing up, like, under his supervision and what. Okay, obviously the more expensive for stuff.
Let's be more careful with those. But no, I grew up reading comics, okay.
And all that stuff. And I just got to the age where I was becoming a teenager and I thought I knew everything. I know. We all know how that goes, right? So it was this one single gesture where my dad tried gifting me all sorts of stuff, and I'm like, no, whatever. But outside of that, no. I've been around comics the vast majority of my life.
It's so bizarre living on both sides of the equation, being alive in a time where comics were both like, this underground how do you say it?
Uncool edgy.
Reject kids, almost. Right.
We were there at that time, and now comics are a big deal. It's what dominates hollywood. It dominates TikTok and all that stuff. So it's weird to be on both sides of that coin within one lifetime.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's so mainstream now. But let's talk about you and your journey to Scout. So you said that you kind of pitched around and all of that, and then you landed with Scout. So, first, Scout doesn't normally do superhero stuff, right? They normally do other comics.
Did you have to pitch to them in person? How did that go? Was that nerve wracking?
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yes, it's entirely nerve wracking. So the proper journey of shit show began during it's funny because it's called Shit Show. And it was pretty watching.
The story I tell everyone is, I was watching Shameless, and the idea was like, what if Frank Gallagher had superpowers? What kind of wonky stories could we get into? And then, of course, that kind of expand and grew. And what happens if the entire Gallagher family had superpowers? But the basis of the story was that they're not necessarily bad people, they've just been put into bad situations or less than average situations or something of that nature. So it came with that idea and I started tinkering with it. I would scroll social media for artists I liked.
Then you reach out to artists and be like, hey, I have this idea. Do you like it? No, I don't have the time for that. Okay, well, then you reach out to artists, too, and, hey, do you like this idea? And that artist says, okay, yeah, I'll draw anything you want as long as you paint me. So I said, okay, whatever. So it's like trying to find the same artist. So I was developing, like, if you want to call it key, know, comparing it to the MCU, it's like akin to seeing Andy Park's visual development art or Ryan Meyerding or something like that.
So I get some tests done and I land on this one artist. Samir Samau, just blows me away with his own pitch to me, I guess.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: And you're still working with him now, right? Because he.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Three he did the first three issues of Shit Show. He's done a bunch of covers for me and we're still working on some things.
We did the first six pages. Most publishers require at least five pages, some required six. So we just went and did the first six pages of the story, scripted it out, and then we put together a pitch packet with an outline of the entire story, those first six pages. And, yeah, we pitched it.
Publishers are notorious, of course they're notorious for wanting what they want, but just follow the submission guidelines on each page. And thing with indie publishers is, you have Marvel, you have DC, and they publish an absurd amount of superhero books every single week. So most small publishers say, yeah, we don't really want superhero books. And at the time, several of these publishers explicitly stated, yeah, we're not really interested in superhero books. We pitched around. We pitched scout. I think Scout was one of those sites that says, yeah, we're not interested in the tights and capes.
And for some reason, they messaged emailed back two months later and said, yeah, we want to publish this book. I said okay. Sweet. Yeah. Where do I sign? I can't eat these chicken strips fast enough to get back to my computer.
Where do I sign? The dot? Just send me the contract, I'm in. And that was that.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Did you ever think it was going to become such I don't want to say like Operation. But it's a universe, right? I mean, you've got the shit show, comics. You have a bunch of stuff coming out next year that's in the same universe, right? I think it's the moon.
I'm blanking on the name. Is it moon?
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Moonspots. Not next year. Moonspawn is on the schedule for 2024.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Which is an exclusive for you. But no, I have five different titles. We have five different titles coming out in some shape, way, or form. There's a four issue miniseries coming out. There's three issue miniseries coming out. There's two one shots. And yeah, I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but yeah, it snowballed. And writing shit Show volume one. Once we got picked up, then we started working on the script and the world and all this stuff. And if you read Shit know, the basis of Shit show is Rich McCoy, the superhero known as legend in our world, can't stop the one thing he needs to stop. So the age of heroes comes to an end without getting spoilers. That's just how it happens. Most heroes most villains are no longer heroes. And villains, maybe they died, maybe they went away. Maybe they got their power stripped.
And because of that, that weighs down on him and he becomes dependent on alcohol and other substances.
So that's the basis of shit show. And because of that, that just kind of lends itself to a larger world to make it more impactful. The more stories we tell about all these different superheroes, the more impactful shit show is going to be. Because you can't put all of these heroes into that one book and make it a nice, tight, cohesive story.
So, yeah, we're just keep fleshing it out. Some of these books are prequels. Some of these are in the current timeline as the story moves forward. But yeah, I'll say, I have no idea what I'm doing.
I'm just trying to make comics, and it's just whatever idea pops in. And that's the one thing about writing.
You can write whatever the hell you want.
No one's stopping you. You could write whatever the hell you want. Some stuff might be good enough. You might like some stuff enough to continue onto the art phase and to continue paying artists to do your comic book for you. And some stuff you might put on the back burner and read three years later and be like, what the hell was I thinking?
This needs to be deleted as soon as possible. But yeah, some things make it to the production and development stage, and some things are just we'll forever live as a bullet point in the one of 50 journals I have laying around my house.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Now, along those lines, what do you think you do better now that you have all this work under your belt compared to when you first started out and you were messaging people for collaboration and stuff like that?
What have you refined that you're really good at.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I think the most important thing is the writing itself, as with anything you do in life.
What's the adage, you have to do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert or something like that? Don't quote me on that. I have no idea what the state is, but you get the gist.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: I think it's like a Malcolm Gladwell quote from one of his books or something like that. Yeah, I totally know what I mean.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but the writing itself I can't read Shit Show Volume One anymore, even though as it stands now in the schedule that's my lone published work comics take so long to make. So I wrote Shit Show, like, one of my very first things five years ago, okay. And we got that into production and got that locked so I couldn't go back and change any of the dialogue or any of the pacing or any of that.
So the writing itself has grown leaps and bounds in the five years I've been doing this.
Project management, trying to keep everything in line. I never thought I was a super organized person. I still probably aren't, judging by other people's standards, but I'm much more organized and versed in project management now than I was before. And just collaborative efforts, collaboration. Growing up, I always picked up the video games or board games where it would say, create your own blank, create your own wrestler, create your own hero character world or whatever. But comics are is very much our own. It's your and my own, not just mine or yours. It's sharing these characters and these stories with everyone else. And you have to work with someone who's open to tweaking their own work. And you also have to be open yourself to receiving the criticisms from I'm not sure if they're criticisms, but you have to be open to bending your own script and words to mesh with the style of the artist or ideas. Every single artist I've worked with has elevated my scripts fully.
I have never had knock on wood. I have never worked with an artist that's been a pain in the ass. Everyone's like what I'm working on with Macabre Mel right now. Rollins, he understands comics. He is a full on comics artist. I give him the scripts. I give him very little direction in the scripts. And sometimes he'll throw in two or three extra panels and I'm like, I'm such an idiot for not thinking that makes the story that much better.
So you'll come along situations like that. And that's one of the good things about comics. It's such a collaboration. Each comic has at least three creatives involved between a writer. Some comics will have five with writer pencils, inks, colors, letters, editors.
So that's something I enjoy a lot.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Know, you mentioned Roland. Let's talk a little bit about Mel. So I think I read somewhere maybe I listened to an interview where you said that you kind of used her writing and wrote about her when you were kind of burned out from writing. I think the Shit show comics. Is that true? Can you talk about.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: It'S? It's unique because I've done shit show. I've done a second miniseries that's gotten picked up by Scott, which is something we're releasing next year. I've done two Kickstarters and countless short stories, all set in this one universe. Yet. Macabre mel wicked salvation is the second thing I ever wrote.
It was just something like something happens at Shit show volume one.
We'll just say it. Mel finds herself dead.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: You have that in the Kickstarter. So it's not yes, it's not full out spoilers.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah, she finds herself dead. And I always knew she was going to come back. It's comics. Everyone comes back, but she doesn't come back fully. There's changes. There's a sword involved, so on and so forth. But I'm like, man, she's a total badass.
We have to tell the story of how she comes back. So like you said, when I would get burnt out, when I would write myself into a corner or whatever, I'd get rider's block on Shit show.
I'm not sure if you could tell just by talking with me, but I certainly have tension issues. So I bounce around anyways.
So I would bounce between should show volume one and Macabre Mill writing ideas and stuff. And one of these ideas were like, no matter what, she needs to go to an underworld. That underworld we decided was Hell. And wicked salvation was born.
We wrote a short story about Lucifer and we wanted to kind of tie everything together.
So yeah, Macabre Mel, Wicked Salvation, she goes to hell to battle the devil for the right to her soul so she can come back and save her friends what she does in shit show three.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: And now there's a sword, right? So I think on Twitter or something, you said that the story was like King Arthur, basically a female King Arthur. And that kind of hooked me because that's there's this there's this sword and is the sword of serpentia. Can you talk about that? Is that Excalibur or is that a like, what can you say about.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: One of my favorite comic creators ever is Mike Mignola from the Hellboy universe. What he does, he loves mythology. And my bookshelf right here under my printer is nothing but mythology books and tomes and all sorts of stuff.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: There's a lovecraft collection down there as well. But a bunch know, I just love, you know, the Egyptian gods. I love the Greek Pantheon. But the point about Mike Mignola is that he's true to the roots of these stories that have been told for centuries and centuries and centuries. And the point is they're good ass stories if they've been told this long, right?
But the thing about him is while he's true to those stories, he also puts a fresh take on it. And that's kind of what we're doing here with King Arthur. You'll see Merlin I think Merlin's even in the preview pages on the yeah. And we're putting our spin on it, which means Merlin goes to this alternate dimension with this one eyed Time Lord that is both good and evil. Mushruratu is the guy's name, and that's kind of our I have no plans to bring the Excalibur story into us to this thing.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Just a magic sword.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a magic sword with someone's skull.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: I do have plans to tell that story and whose skull that is, hopefully eventually. But no, that's the cool thing about the superhero universe.
If you go to a panel about breaking into comics, everyone always says start small. But I figured if I kind of laid the groundwork for this world, I could tell people shoot lasers out of their eyes. We're dealing with demons, the devil, an ancient king with a sword that could teleport him through space and time. Like, I could write any story, any genre, ever. One of the stories I'm releasing next year is a street level thing with just a dude who has no superpowers but wants to be a hero you could tell any type of story in. And that's that's the cool thing about superhero comics.
I would love to tell, like, the King Arthur Knights of the it's that's that's an era that really fascinates me as well.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: I really loved Frank Miller's curse, so this kind of gave me kind of those vibes, and that's why I'm so excited about this.
You have this stuff coming up next year, and you also mentioned 2024, what's coming out next year that you can talk about.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: I love cosmic stories. And the ride versus first cosmic story is called Keepers of the Cosmos. I've posted about this before, and that's under contract with Scout Comics. The first issues coming out in April. I don't have a date or anything like that. And then two and three, they do stagger the releases throughout the year at Scout.
The next one is that street level Hero, which is I love all my characters equally and all my stories equally. But this story about the street level character is the one thing I would have bet my life savings on getting picked up, but it never did. For whatever reason, I'm like, man, I love this story. These characters are so badass.
But it never got picked up.
So we're going to publish it anyways. Why not?
We're going to publish it ourselves if we have to print 25 copies, because that's all that sells. We'll print 25 copies if we have to print a million. Sure. Yeah. That's cool. That'll let me make a lot more superhero books.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Is it different working with a publisher versus doing it indie? Because it seems like with Indie, there's a lot more work, right? Mel has this Kickstarter you're trying to get it out there. You're trying to get people to support it, which you should for $10 if you can.
How does that work? How do you stay sane? How does that.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: With any indie comics, even if you do get picked up with a publisher, scout is still considered a small press, right? Scout is not the dark horse or image of the world. So even with shit show, there was still a fair amount of my own promotion and my own marketing and my own scheduling interviews and press and all sorts of that.
So there's not really much difference between the two. I mean, Scout handled all the distribution and printing and all that stuff, which is arguably the biggest part, but at the same time, then you split royalties and there's all sorts of schedule. Yeah, whatever.
But many creators are moving to the digital route with substack and to the self publishing route, and that's just something I wanted to do. And the stars aligned, I guess, for this route to let us self publish. Scout didn't want this one story. Nobody else wanted this one story. But we love this one story. We love this one story so damn much, we're just going to do it, and we're going to launch that in January.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: That's phenomenal. So is there anything that you haven't talked about that you think you want people to know, either about Macabre, Mel, or any of the other characters in the shit show? You if you haven't read anything else, could you just start with Mel?
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Yeah, you could. It's definitely self contained, and that's kind of all my thought process behind Be. You don't need this whole thing. There's a reading order, there's two reading orders to make life much more complicated, because that's just who I am on lunchroomwrite.com. So if you want the whole thing, if you want to read chronologically, if you want to read release order, all that stuff's up on the website. But all of these stories are going to be self contained, and they'll just be fun nods or cameos or Easter eggs, or post credit scenes. Post credit scenes. I do air quotes, but no. Yeah. Wicked Salvation is an awesome story. It's a 56 page graphic novella.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: And it's black and white, right?
[00:29:41] Speaker B: It's black and white, yes. That's another thing we started working on a while ago. Each October, we plan to do a horror type story, and those we want to keep in black and white as an homage to the pulp comics, to the precord.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: Yes. Which is quite unique because Werewolf by Night also came out in that same exact format.
And it's the best thing I've ever watched.
That's what we plan on doing. We're doing this October. We're doing next October with another Bonkers Wild character. But no.
What do I want people to know? Just I don't know. You can check. Macabremel.com is where the Kickstarter is. We're live until October 31. But at the same time I've always had the belief that every single person on the face of this planet has a story to tell.
And we live in an age where there's infinite opportunities to tell that story. Now obviously everyone doesn't get the same opportunity because connections and politics and all that bullshit everyone has to deal with on a daily basis. But there's wattpad, there's thread something you write and tweet. There's tumblr still around, right? There's Microsoft's Word. Google Docs is free, right? Go to docs. Google.com or whatever it is and keep know there's plenty of spots to put up your writings. But yeah, I just want to tell stories with characters I like. And more importantly, I love reading other people's stories with characters I also like because that inspires me in the own way. In its own way. So if you've even had any interest, just pull up a Google Doc and start typing out a bullet point list. Step one, step two, step three, step four. And then if you fall in love with that, start writing prose or start writing an outline or something of that nature.
[00:31:49] Speaker A: I love that. That's so inspiring. Well, thank you very much for being here and if you're listening and you have the chance, check out the kickstarter. Macabremel.com, right?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Yes.
Macabremel.com or wickedsalvation.com? Both will lead you to it. We go until October 31, I think. 07:00 P.m central.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Either one works and I can't wait to read it.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: No problem.
Dam Sam.
