[majestic music] [majestic music continues] [majestic music continues] [majestic music continues] [majestic music continues] - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture".

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

We are coming to you from Heroes Con 2024.

For the third straight year, we've taken our cameras out of the studio and onto the floor of the Charlotte Convention Center.

It's a lot of work setting up the Comic Culture booth for three hectic days, interacting with fans, comic legends, and aspiring creators.

But it's also a fast and fun weekend.

I get to meet a lot of interesting people.

And on this episode of "Comic Culture", I'm bringing their stories to you.

First up, podcaster, Bill Bere.

So "The Bat-Pod", I'm guessing this is, just by the name, about Batman?

- Yes, we're a Batman comic book discussion podcast.

We do old issues and then we do new issues.

We're not really a review podcast.

We just like two guys in a comic shop talking about storylines and that sort of thing.

Just stuff we enjoy.

- Now, is there a particular era that you're fond of?

I know for me, if I pick up a Batman that has Jim Aparo artwork- - Oh yeah.

- I'm in heaven, so.

- That's the era, you know, late eighties, middle to late eighties, early nineties, that sort of thing is, that's where I grew up reading Batman.

And I think from Batman 400 and on, that's when I really started collecting it monthly.

- 400 is the one with the great Sienkiewicz cover.

- Right.

- You know, we're at Heroes Con.

If you had unlimited budget, what would be the one thing that you could hope to find to take home?

- If I had unlimited budget, you know, first appearances of some of the villains, Poison Ivy.

I don't have that one.

Mr.

Freeze, a couple books like that.

- Now, as somebody who remembers the "Batman" '66 TV series, is there a sweet spot because that's around the time when Poison Ivy appears in the comics.

It's when "Batman" is on TV.

- [Bill] Right on.

- Mr.

Freeze, of course, Otto Preminger played him on the TV show.

So is that part of the Batman that you identify with or are you more the- - Always, yeah, that's the Batman that I definitely identify with.

And of course when you see that sort of humor in the comics, that sort of thing.

And that's, you know, you had that in the sixties and that sort of thing, that kind of Batman.

But yeah, and in my podcast we play a lot of clips from "Batman" '66.

That's the one thing I have in there a lot.

- And if the folks watching wanted to find your podcast, where can they locate that?

- It's TheBatPod.com.

- Well, thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Panels are a big part of the convention experience, whether it's a group of editors from your favorite Marvel comics of the 1980s, or the panel I moderate about podcasts, which featured Jason Dehart, host of the "Words, Images, and Worlds" podcast.

This podcast, it is sort of an academic look at comics.

- Academics plays a role in probably everything I do in one way or another.

That being said, it's not an intimidating conversation that requires lots of definitions or citations or anything like that.

But I'm an educator.

I've been a teacher for 17 years now.

I think I'm headed into year 18.

And so there's a little bit of literacy and English education that flows into everything that I do.

So I'll have poets that come on, I'll have fellow educators, scholars, comics traders.

It's an open-ended invitation for anybody that's creating comics, creating words, and wants to share about them.

- When I was growing up, comics were for kids and they weren't considered great literature and they weren't considered something that a serious student should be reading.

And yet we see in the eighties, Frank Miller and Alan Moore are sort of pushing the envelope to be, I guess the acceptance of comics and literature.

So as you are using comics in education, how are you sort of, how are you doing it?

'Cause it seems like, you know, there's a lot more narrative than there is perhaps biographical, so how do you kind of tap into that?

- There are so many different ways to tell stories in comics and there are so many different stories.

I've become more and more aware of them over the past few years.

I was very much a superhero comics kind of thing growing up.

And I would read Batman, some of those titles that you were mentioning, Frank Miller.

There's really so much more than superheroes that can be told through comics.

We have science comics, history comics, if you can think of it, it can pretty well be managed in some way within a comic.

But it's surprising how often there are inroads that you can make with comics across languages, breaking things down in terms of, like I mentioned, science comics.

That's a great way to think about analysis.

And if it were easy and if everybody was on board with it, I would probably find something else to do because I like to just kind of trouble the waters a little bit and recenter the narrative.

And even something like an infographic, if you add some narrative details and some additional elements to it, you've got a pretty decent one page, two page comic that you can use.

- How do you kind of find what you can incorporate into what you do?

- I'm an avid reader.

That's the last thing I do every day before I go to bed, I read books, it helps me unwind and sometimes it keeps me awake, but it's something that I enjoy.

It's a passion of mine.

And so I'm one of those people who will always look through the recommendations on Amazon, Goodreads, NetGalley, and there is a good word of mouth too.

I have friends that enjoy comics and that study them academically.

And so following them on social media and having conversations, it's a great way to keep up.

And I use the expression keep up very loosely because there are always things being published.

There are always new books, so it's sort of like bailing yourself out with water when there's more water flowing in.

But that's, it's kind of a beautiful thing, especially if you like water.

And I do in this metaphoric case, even though I can't swim.

- With your podcast, you're talking with writers, artists, folks who are involved with comics, but not necessarily so how do you get this podcast to work and what sort of things could we expect if we tune in?

- I think you can always expect a good conversation about literacy and about books.

There are certain things that I tend to ask about that I'm always interested in.

I'm always interested in connecting readers with books.

And so getting to hear the history of how someone got involved in the creating they do, that's always an interesting question.

Getting to hear how ideas come, how the process comes.

I'm a big fan of learning about the writing process and writing, including illustrating.

And so those are things that you can generally count on.

And then I always try to give some sort of reference point where people can go and learn more.

If the podcast is something that you've checked out the first time or if you're an active listener and viewer, always the last question, almost always, is going to be some website, some space, an academic resource where you can go and find out more information about whatever we're talking about.

- Well that's a great segue for my last question.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and your podcast, where can they find you on the web?

- The podcast is on YouTube, it's on Spotify, it's on Amazon, it's on Apple.

And if you go to any of those spaces and you look up my name or you look up "Words, Images, and Worlds", you will most likely find it fairly easily.

And we've done several episodes.

I've been pretty prolific in it and I just tend to respond when people respond and want to come on.

So there are hundreds of episodes out there that people can check out and you can always find me online doing different things with writing about literacy and sharing ideas.

So hopefully that's a pretty open-ended way to go and find out more information.

- Well, thank you so much.

- My pleasure, thank you.

- Jason wasn't the only educator using comics in unexpected ways at Heroes Con.

I met Sterg Botzakia, a writing professor.

You aren't just a fan, you are an academic who, from what I understand, uses comics in your teaching.

- [Sterg] Yes.

- So how do you sort of incorporate what's generally considered entertainment into something that's otherwise considered academic work?

- Lots of ways actually.

Most recently I taught a graphic novel class to doctoral students who are all literacy studies, usually dealing with children's and young adult literature.

But as part of the class and it's also kind of turned into a research opportunity, I had students not write reflections written, I had them draw comics as responses to the texts.

So it was very interesting kind of experience because they're used to writing academically and they're not largely used to writing comics at all.

So they had a real crash course in learning just how much time and effort and energy goes into comics 'cause a lot of them are like, "Oh, I thought this would be a snap.

"And I just go in, I draw some comics," and then they end up taking hours and then like it's eyeopening for them to learn like, okay, what actually goes into making these things?

'Cause like they consume them, but they don't necessarily know like what goes into creating them, which is eyeopening for a lot of 'em.

- Well, I would imagine if I'm a student taking a class that involves comics and there's an expectation of drawing comics that I'm going to be drawing comics.

But I'm also assuming that there's students who take a class and they're just kind of petrified at the thought of sharing what they're drawing or they say, "I can't draw anything but a stick figure."

So how do you encourage them that it's okay not to be perfect as long as I can enjoy it.

- That's a real common thing.

And I show 'em, I show them comics that aren't like, Dinosaur Comics, like the online ones that Ryan North does that he uses clip art, he's used the same template, I think that's been going for almost 20 years at this point, it feels like.

And they're comics.

They're exactly the same layout all the time.

I show them XKCD, which is stick figures.

It's not really fancy, but it's more about like the writing and the composition and the thoughtfulness into like what goes into the comic.

It can be the words, it can be the design and like how they do it image wise.

And then there's also a lot of online resources that I've found.

There's programs like Canva and they use Bitmojis sometimes, like I said, and there's other drawing programs that they've kind of learned to like take photos and like comic-fy them or something, for lack of a better term.

And they spend hours, they tell me, like designing these, they're like, "I didn't think anything."

And like the people who do the bitmojis, like they get very intricate with the design and like looking for the exact right thing and the angle and like the little backgrounds and little just stuff that goes along with like, in the scenes.

And it's one of those things where they learn a lot about, it's, there's so many resources now.

Like even if you're not like Picasso or, and I use Picasso as I'm like, Picasso could actually draw like Da Vinci, but he chose not to.

Like he did that and then I was like, you can draw different ways.

And it's like, it's about representation and ideas and really thinking about hitting on those things.

And then when we read the comics and the graphic novels, they can say like, "Oh, I look at this "and I look at this design aspect."

And we usually have conversations about things like, okay, what's in here, that couldn't be in like a print textbook.

What what in this is uniquely comics that only comics could do, couldn't be in a movie, couldn't do something like, and we have conversations about that, which is to me one of the strong parts of the class because comics are their own medium and they're not movies, they're not books like print textbooks or trade books.

But they have their own affordances and they have their own ways of doing things.

And if you teach English, they have to learn figurative language.

They have to learn like how the author creates meaning and intention.

And it's the same thing with comics.

I, you know, the images aren't random.

There's a person who probably some people like, like put a lot of time and effort and draw an image, draw a page, redraw a page, redraw an image multiple times.

And there's a lot of design that goes into it that I don't think most people know.

- As students learning something, we've sort of trained students to think that they've gotta write an academic paper a certain way and you have to answer it this way, but there's a whole other synthesis that has to go into creating a comic and condensing an idea into a story that somebody can follow.

So as you are working with students and sort of retraining them to, I guess, more engage, and maybe you can tell me if this is the case, they sort of have to engage with the information in a new and perhaps more meaningful way for them in order to present it to an audience in a cup.

- I don't wanna say it was therapy, but like people got real personal.

It was like a surprise to me.

And they, like you said, it's not quite academic writing, but it was meaningful writing and it's like in a different mode.

And it was something that kind of surprised me because it was very thoughtful and at the beginning, usually, they're short.

And then for some of them they got to be long.

Like I'd ask for a response and you know, I'd say just do a page and I'd get like six, seven pages.

'Cause they were like, it had to go.

And they would, some of 'em would experiment with techniques and things like that, which was really fascinating.

Like clip art or like showing like altering images and doing like lots of, I mean there's so many things you can do, aside from drawing with images now.

And it was really fascinating to see kind of what they came up with.

- Well thank you so much.

- No worries, thank you for having me.

- The Comic Culture crew wasn't the only show working the convention, I met North Carolina YouTubers, Chris and Josh Boyd known as the Brothers Boyd.

It's amazing how a convention like this, working at a convention, meeting people, and it really will help you kind of grow your brand.

So what's the strategy for your YouTube channel?

- Really our strategy is to reach as many people as we can and share our love of all things pop culture, whether it be comics or movies or things like that.

And what we want to do is just continue to grow and continue to move out beyond just the state of North Carolina and just continue to grow the channel.

And really for us it's just, and I think Josh'll agree, we just have fun doing it.

So we want to bring a little bit of our joy of doing it to the viewers that are watching this.

- If I'm watching, what could I expect to see?

- Comics, we do conventions.

A couple weeks ago we were in Raleigh at the Horror Fest.

It was Carolina Fear Fest.

So we try to cover all the angles of everything that we have a fandom for.

So our pop culture is "Star Wars", "He-Man", "Superman", and the comics.

Chris is a Batman fan.

We try to hit on all those things.

- And as fans turn pros or journalists, you know, how do you sort of temper that, I really like this stuff, with the, I want you to like this stuff to the audience.

- What I try to do whenever we do review a comic or something is I give them my opinion but I also give them the things that made me really like the comic.

And I hope that my excitement and my exuberance for the book will expand out to whoever may be watching the podcast and say, "Hey, that sounds pretty good, "let's go check this out."

Because one of the things we like to do is we like to grab indie comic creators.

We bring them in, we let them talk about their comics, and it helps them get a platform where they can talk about their comics and share it with other people so.

- And we, I mean we want to bring information to the people.

We do, whenever we do a convention we try to do a pre-show with the show runner where we record and talk about everything that's gonna be at the show.

So if you're kind of on the fence about going to a show, you know what's gonna be there and you know whether it's gonna be the place you want to be or not.

Hopefully it gets you excited about it and gets you there 'cause we mentioned that one thing you were looking for that you didn't know was gonna be there.

- This is a huge convention.

So as you are going around, as you are, you know, YouTubers trying to build your channel, how do you kind of focus on those targets that you are trying to reach versus I'm gonna focus on everything because there's just so much here.

- I think you have to kind of do it like in stages.

One of the things we did when we got here last night is we walked around and we checked out the lay of the land basically and said "Okay, this is what we want to do "when we get here tomorrow."

So as far as focusing on what we do is we want to focus on the vendors, we want them to be spotlighted.

We also want to focus on the average person that's walking around too because we know that's the people that are gonna be watching on shows so.

- And we always try to go around and focus in on the indie creators, get them to give us what we call an elevator pitch for their book and then we will take that and put it on our channel to help promote their book.

So we go for that promotion of these local indie creators who may not get everything they get with Marvel and DC and all of the bigger companies.

- And if the folks at home watching wanted to find you on YouTube, what's your channel name?

- We are The Brothers Boyd.

- Very simple.

- Yes.

- Just The Brothers Boyd, make sure you add the D 'cause the Brothers Boy is a bluegrass band.

- Yes.

- So, yep.

- People attending Heroes Con aren't just fans of comics, it's not uncommon to see a wide variety of fandoms represented like Edgar Rice Burroughs fan Aaron Oliver.

- We are a new chapter of the Burroughs Bibliophile, which is an international organization that works to promote and preserve the legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs and all his works, I guess you could call him the original creator of the superhero.

Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, David Innes of "Pellucidar".

All three of those characters alone you actually see in Shuster and Siegel's Superman, the ability, before he could fly, he was just leaping.

John Carter leaped his way across Mars.

- Well I think a lot of us are familiar with Tarzan, maybe a little less familiar with John Carter and I will admit I haven't heard of that last character.

- David Innes?

- David Innes, so you know, it seems that an organization like this is important to pop culture because we need to remember the shoulders on who's, I guess the giants on whose shoulders we're standing.

- [Aaron] That's right, that's right.

- So what does this organization do to sort of make sure that we don't forget these characters and these authors.

- Our state chapters, and we serve both North and South Carolina, we're sort of in our infancy.

So we're just getting started.

We have about 33 members in the two states and right now, we are just, we're holding Zoom sessions, sort of book clubs.

We get together, discuss the various books in the series.

We just finished "The Land That Time Forgot" series, which is actually three books, but most people incorporate it under one.

It's celebrating its 100th anniversary.

So we discussed those series of books, the writer's style in each one and the types of things that he did to promote the story and move it along, the framework so to speak, of the stories and so we enjoy that.

And so right now it's just mostly fellowship but as we move into our third year, we're really looking to find ways to promote Burroughs in the two states.

- You know, it's chilly in the convention center but it's not so chilly that you need a quilt.

So what is the story of the quilt?

- So we are, this is our first fundraising effort.

So we, my wife is a quilter so she and her guild agreed to create what's called a Tarzan quilt.

So this features the silhouette from the original hardback edition, 1914, and in the panels all around it, all 24 adult titles of the Tarzan series and on the back, just to keep it sort of culturally authentic, we have an African design.

- And I understand you, you've been getting this signed by artists who have worked on Tarzan and- - Well we've actually not signed, we've had photos.

- Photos.

- Photos we're gonna use it, they've been gracious enough to pose with the quilt for free and we're gonna use that for some of our publicity and advertising.

- Thank you so much.

- Okay, thank you, I appreciate it.

- Some attendees don't come to Heroes Con to buy comics or to meet their favorite creators.

Instead they come dressed up as their favorite characters like sisters Kaitlyn Dimmett and Lauren Kattrell and Lauren's daughter Riley.

I had to stop you in the aisle because you are, I guess a trio of cosplayers.

- Yes, there's actually more of us floating around here somewhere.

- So what is it about cosplay, what is it about a convention that makes you wanna spend the time, the effort, the money to make these great costumes and you know, walk around?

- I have a couple answers for that.

One, our dad is a nerd, the best nerd, and even though he has three daughters, he raised us in a household of inclusiveness and we were able to really show our personalities and emotions through the picking of different characters.

Also we're a little socially awkward and when you're, something about being in costume makes you come out of that, it's also something I get to do with my babies and they enjoy it.

Do you enjoy it?

- Yeah.

- And it gives us a chance to come together.

- Yeah.

- You know we all live very, very far apart.

- Yeah.

- So we can all meet at cons and dress up and stay at the hotel.

It gives us something that we can do together as a family that we really all enjoy in our different ways for different reasons.

- Now I'm gonna ask the the important question.

- Yeah.

- You are Black Widow, you are Poison Ivy, and of course, Supergirl.

- Yes.

- So you know, does the family fight over Marvel versus DC?

- Actually no.

- No, so we grew up in a very- - Marvel.

- Yes we were, my dog's name is Marvel, I have another dog named Rocket.

We were taught that DC was the enemy and then all of a sudden my dad was like, let's do some DC cosplays.

- DC cosplays.

- We were like okay, that's interesting.

So we let the girls pick, my other daughter, my older daughter is Katana today.

My dad is the Mandalorian today and our other sister is actually Spidergirl.

Yesterday she was a Spider Gwen and Bailey was Yelena Belova, which is another version of Black Widow.

We just kind of do whatever we want and make it work together and there's no right or wrong, it's just whatever you feel comfortable in.

- And I am still very, very privileged that I get to live with my dad 'cause he can't kick me out.

I'm his baby.

So I get to go to him and be like, "Hey, hear me out."

- Yeah.

- "I want this.

"Help me make it happen."

And I get to do things like this.

This is my, the first time I'm actually wearing this version of this Poison Ivy because- - And she actually made a lot of it herself.

My dad didn't all of it for her which is nice.

- I was gonna ask, I mean, do you make your own costume?

- Yeah, there's parts of it, like the body suit on this one I purchased, but we've like, I sewed her some leggings for her Harley Quinn.

- These are 3D printed.

- And then my dad 3D printed these.

- The belts, the like strapping is purchased, but all of this is 3D printed.

The guns are 3D printed.

The batons are 3D printed and then we kind of just work together to create whatever we can.

We do live separately.

I live in Charleston, they live in Eastern North Carolina and so we just kind of like come together and do whatever we can.

I sew, my dad's learning to sew.

- Yeah.

- She's good at hot gluing.

- I'm great at hot gluing.

Mine is hot glue like the leaves.

There's no way to individually sew these on.

I would be there forever.

- Yeah.

Hot glue is a cosplayer's best friend.

- It is.

Everything is kind of just a little skill of everything and we've just kind of learned, my dad always taught us that you're only- - [Both] Limited by your imagination.

- On the third day of Heroes Con, I spoke to fan, Terry Blackmon.

What is it about a convention like this that makes you want to, you know, spend a day or two walking around and checking things out?

- It's just the people, honestly, I guess it's such like a great environment, like to be around, you know, you have your fans, you have your dealers and people that you know, just having a great time with people that you know.

- As you've been here this weekend, you know, what's been the thing that surprised you the most?

- The amount of people that like I see every single year it's like, it's always growing.

It's like more people and it's like more books out there for people to buy and everything.

It's just like a variety of everything for everybody to enjoy.

- And you know, as you were walking around interacting with people, you know, this is a friendly place but you know, have you just had that random conversation with somebody that, about something that you share an interest in?

You know, have that community sort of?

- Yeah, it's like everybody here, like everybody has like common interests of like comic books and art and like that's it.

It's like those main two things that go together.

Then like, you know, you have your other niches things like, you know, like the indie island for example.

You know like the indie art and everything people that also like, so it's a different thing for everybody.

- And if you were walking around and there was one thing you could get, whether it was a comic, whether it was a signature, whether it was a piece of original art, is there something that you wish you could get?

- Wish I could get?

I saw an All American Comic 16 earlier.

I wish I could get that.

- You know, if you had unlimited resource that you're digging into to old "Green Lanterns".

- Golden Age more specifically, just anything Golden Age or Silver Age, like very high grade at that point I could get it if I had the resources to get them.

- And I'd ask you the most contentious question I could ever possibly ask someone.

Are you a backing board or are you a slabbing fan?

- I do both, but typically like, I just backing board my stuff.

If it's like an expensive item, I'll just slab it.

- Well, thank you so much.

That's all the time we have for this episode of "Comic Culture".

Thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you again soon.

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