SiriusXM’s new podcast series, Comic-Con Begins: Origin Stories of the San Diego Comic-Con and the Rise of Modern Fandom, promises to be the final word on the history of a beloved pop-culture juggernaut. More than that, though, it looks to go beyond being a mere fawning tribute. Sure there are the expected celebrity interviews, but there are also in-depth examinations of the folks behind the scenes who aren’t household names but that nevertheless were instrumental in shaping our modern geeky landscape. I would expect nothing less from pop culture historian Mathew Klickstein. As a producer, director, and co-writer of the project, his passion is evident from the word go.
Michael Cavender: What was the genesis of the project and what it is that you hoped to achieve by making it?
Mathew Klickstein: I have a longtime friend who is a fellow writer that I look up to as something of a mentor. He’s been around through many of my projects over the years, and the first thing he said when he saw Comic-Con Begins coming together was, “Well… looks like you’re finally getting your ‘nerd book’ out there.”
In a lot of ways, that’s true. Because, the genesis of this project could be tracked all the way back to around 2014 when I was first developing what would be a book about the origins, nature, and changing face of so-called “nerd culture” or, these days, maybe “geek culture.” “Fandom” as a community, really. Which is, ultimately, a lot of what Comic-Con Begins is about.
Due to a series of complex circumstances that tend to pop up for we Working Class Creatives and really anyone trying to do anything in the publishing/media/entertainment world these days, that book ended up getting bounced around to different houses and imprints until it popped up as a highly attenuated version in China in 2018.
While I was glad that some version of the book came out, after years of research and hard labor on the thing, the final product was far from what I had originally been planning.
Nevertheless, one good thing that came out of the situation was a friendship forged with a woman named Wendy All. Wendy was one of the original committee members involved in the running of the San Diego Comic-Con in the early years (1970s). For the “nerd book,” she was more or less my Comic-Con “expert” or “historian” who helped me with sections of the book that dealt with that scene.
As often happens with a lot of my interviewees on projects, Wendy and I remained friendly over the years, and I would continue to hit her up for quotes if I was writing something that might’ve had a connection even tertiarily to Comic-Con or to “fandom culture” itself.
In early 2020 – early January, so right at the start of the year but also right at the start of all the Covid/lockdown scenarios to come – I was developing a handful of new projects with a literary agent at the time, trying to figure out what my next big subject(s) would be. After a few false starts, we decided on doing something about Comic-Con. Namely, because I realized all at once that I had this fantastic, invaluable contact in Wendy All to gain behind-the-velvet-rope access into that scene for such a book.
Wendy quickly agreed to support the project, to introduce me to all of the (surviving) heavy hitters from the foundational years of Comic-Con, and – more importantly – to make sure they knew I was a guy they could trust and talk to, a guy who could get the job done right. Which in and of itself was extremely crucial to the project.
This would be an oral history, and as with similar projects I’ve produced and written over the years, I didn’t want to skimp on interviewees. I wanted everyone in this thing. And a lot of these people are very private citizens, some of them basically off-the-grid (a few have never had computers, for example), and there have been a couple of smaller attempts at telling the SDCC story that rubbed some folks the wrong way due to misrepresentation or misinformation.
Wendy’s handing over her “little black book” of names/numbers/emails etc. and the fact she’d already told everyone to play ball here… That’s the principal reason Comic-Con Begins happened at all. I’d wager it’s why there hasn’t been such an in-depth oral history of what is objectively the largest pop culture event globally: the folks involved in the early days were somewhat tight-lipped or distrustful of allowing one to happen. Until now and due to Wendy’s nudging them to go with me.
Meanwhile, Covid starts becoming more prevalent, and my agent and I are getting worried about how unstable everything is getting. We’re troupers, though. So, while being very anxious about world events, concerned for the wellbeing of family/friends and ourselves et al, we kept trying to keep up with the workload of developing the Comic-Con oral history.
Said agent decided maybe an audiobook version might be an easier, better fit for the time being. So, we started working on the idea of an “audiobook original” instead of a traditional hard/softcover book. I reached out to a few audio guru friends of mine about the best ways of handling remote interviews (this was still in the earliest days of us all figuring out what the hell Zoom was), about what kinds of things we could do in post-production without access to professional studios if they were going to be shut down, etc.
One of those friends was a longtime podcast professional, Rob Schulte. I had brought Rob onto an earlier, much smaller podcast I’d produced for Wired years ago, and had kicked him a bunch of work/connections over time that turned out to be very fruitful.
Not surprisingly, Rob began really getting into the concept with me, and we started messing around with different ideas of how a full oral history like this could come together entirely remotely but still with crystal-clear audio quality.
Things became more chaotic and desperate with Covid/lockdown, and it was clear we would simply have to stop for the time being. The publishing industry – along with everything else in the human world – had completely shut down and was thrown into disarray.
Meanwhile, I had all of these fantastic contacts in the Comic-Con world (some of whom we were all worried wouldn’t be around much longer, especially with Covid impacting older people at much higher rates; we wanted to make sure we could get these people “on tape” before they were gone to what Con folks themselves call “Comic-Con Heaven”).
Everyone was still willing to talk with me. They were looking forward to it. At last, a way to preserve their legacy, to get out the true story/STORIES of the birth of Comic-Con. Not to mention, I had already bought and read way too many books on early fandom, comics, sci-fi history, along with documentaries and such I’d watched, as well as whatever other research I could get my hands on for six months of deep project development.
None of us at this point wanted to call it quits. We all really wanted to do it.
And then Rob called me up a few days later to say SiriusXM – where he’d been working for the past few years – was getting more serious about original podcast series/content. Would I be up to do the Comic-Con oral history… as a podcast series, via SiriusXM? After all, if people are going to need some new “content” to keep themselves occupied at home, well… maybe podcasts were the way to go.
I called up my 50 or so contacts, everyone agreed that would be fine – “JUST GET IT OUT THERE SOMEHOW!!!!” – and a little over a year later, here we are.
MC: It seemed to be a creative choice to not include yourself or your primary collaborators in the actual piece. Can you tell us why you went with that approach and did you find there to be any drawbacks to that format?
MK: It’s a personal choice.
While I’ve seen a fair number of decent documentaries and read a fair number of decent non-fiction books in which the director/writer/creator inserts herself or himself into the story/subject being explored, I typically don’t care for that choice in what I watch and read.
Far too often – especially these days – it seems to me, the director/writer/creator ends up making too much of the story about herself or himself, about her or his take on the subject at hand, and it comes off as rather narcissistic to me and also taints the objectivity for me, too.
If I want to watch a documentary about, say, the making of the Nintendo-based Fred Savage movie The Wizard, I want to watch a documentary about the making of the Nintendo-based Fred Savage movie The Wizard. I don’t want to watch a movie about a fan of the film talking about her or his “personal journey” watching the film over the years, nor how the film has impacted her or his life, nor what the film means to her or him (or other fans they might be able to coral into the documentary) “today.”
It often just feels like filler to me when filmmakers or authors make the choice of injecting themselves into the story. Like they didn’t have access to more of the people actually involved in the story being told, or that they were simply just too lazy to do the real footwork to get said access. This turns me off because it makes me feel like I can’t trust that the filmmaker/author really cares enough about the subject to do it justice.
Simply put, I want an entertaining, engaging, compelling, nuanced history of the subject. I don’t want a personal memoir or op-ed from the filmmaker or author for two hours or 320 pages.
There are obviously those who, in putting themselves in the story, make a whole other kind of project that can be very enjoyable to me. Hunter Thompson, of course, comes to mind. Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 remains one of the most inspirational and influential works I’ve ever read, and it’s almost entirely about Hunter’s personal experiences/biases/opinions/rumors/dreams on the subject at hand.
But, generally, that kind of thing is not for me, and I would frankly be a bit embarrassed to insert myself into one of my projects. I just don’t feel it’s my place to do that, and since I always get so many “experts” or “primary sources” for my projects anyway, I don’t really have any room for anything else.
I know someone who makes sure his name and face, shows up on pretty much every piece of branding for everything he’s involved with, and when I see that kind of egotistical behavior, I just get confused. Doesn’t he feel a little embarrassed about that? (Then again, he also has a Twitch page and is one of those people attempting to gain a following doing those endless “Let’s Play” videos, which I really don’t get; so maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.)
“Personal branding” is very important to a lot of people in the entertainment/media industry – and it certainly has its proven value. But, for me, it just makes me very uncomfortable and is in fact one of many reasons I’m not engaged in social media, as well.
Personally, I’d rather just stay behind the scenes, working the gears, instead of being in front “on-camera,” so to speak. It’s a big part of why I enjoy ghostwriting. It’s my goal, in the end, to help other people tell their stories. I’m trying to create encyclopedic resources with my work, not trendy/clickbait-y hagiographies/tributes, j’accuse attacks, nor personal memoirs revolving around my subjects. Even if those tend to do very well in today’s marketplace!
I don’t think there’s necessarily any drawback with this decision. Yes, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me would not have worked so marvelously well if Moore hadn’t inserted himself into the story (though, it could be – and certainly has been – suggested that he hasn’t really been able to do it so organically and thoughtfully since then, and perhaps he turned out to be something of a bad role model for aspiring documentarians of the future who assumed that was how a doc should be made).
Yes, the tremendous Troll 2 documentary Best Worst Movie couldn’t have happened at all if the filmmaker, who was a featured player in the original film, hadn’t made his doc such a personal reflection on both the history of and cultish fandom of Troll 2.
But I think that, generally, the choice of inserting yourself into your book or movie about someone or something else is not advisable. It too easily disrupts the validity and veracity of the film/book in question. We didn’t want to suffer that problem with Comic-Con Begins.
MC: From archival clips featuring the likes of Stan Lee, Alan Moore, and Chuck Norris to interviews with Kevin Smith, Neil Gaiman, and the Russo brothers collected exclusively for the podcast, you've gathered an impressive array of speakers. Can you talk about the process of getting access to these clips and fan-favorite creators and personalities?
MK: Anyone who is familiar with my work over the years is aware that I’m a crack-shot when it comes to nabbing interviewees for my projects.
I’ve always been extraordinarily adept at tracking down even the hardest-to-get folks, bringing them in for the interview, asking the right questions, and getting the project to a point where all the team members on board are satisfied with the job. A lot of that is just about a certain pit bull persistence on my part, an ever-growing network of resources I’ve continued to foster over the years, and – mainly – blind luck (and certain crazy faith that said blind luck will continue to grace us with its presence).
We knew that for Comic-Con Begins to be truly successful, marketing/branding-wise we would have to get a hearty handful of high-profile personalities (or so-called “influencers”) involved, or else no matter how good the thing was when we finished, no one would hear about it or check it out.
Good or bad, it doesn’t matter: “Celebrity” rules the roost when it comes to marketing/branding these days, and rather than cringing about this fact, we decided to pony up and play the game and get these big-name folks onboard. Turns out most of them had some amazing stories to contribute as well, and really helped fill in some gaps. Kudos to Scott Aukerman, in particular. I had no idea he was such a super-geek philosopher and scholar!!
I did whatever I had to do to get these folks on board, and each one was a different series of challenges.
You figure out who you know who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone… In the case of Kevin Smith, for example, he happened to have just been featured in a documentary I had worked on, and so I asked the producers of that film if they could hook me up with Kevin’s people to make the interview request. His people immediately agreed that Comic-Con Begins would be a good fit for Kevin. So, that one was relatively easy, though very lucky that Kevin just happened to have been in a film I had just worked on.
Others were, of course, much, much harder. Using whatever resources I had, I spent months finding the right rep to talk viz. the notoriously reclusive and “controversial” Frank Miller.
No one responded to any of my requests… but then, by a wild coincidence, after I hit up one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s reps (we have a bit in the series about how Leo’s dad, George – a renowned underground comix creator and old friend of R Crumb’s – was at the Con with his young son back in the day), the rep (not surprisingly) turned me down for the request, a little confused, I think, that I would ask for Leo to talk with me about Comic-Con and fandom.
Well… turns out the same rep also works for Frank Miller (!) and asked me outright if I’d like to talk to him instead since she felt he was more appropriate for such an ask. It only took maybe eight months of emails to maybe ten or so people viz. Miller before I talked to someone about an entirely different person – Leo D – who just happened to be one of Frank’s people too, and – boom – then it went fairly fast from there (though, of course, it still took loads of emails to finalize everything, but that’s just part of the game; persistence is key, as I say!).
SiriusXM was itself, very helpful here too. There were five or so folks they brought on from their end, courtesy Rob (who ended up being the EP of the project and one of our writer/editors as well) and one of our other producers (who also did a lot of writing/editing and other jobs, since we all had to wear multiple hats!), Christopher Tyler. Every few weeks, we’d get hit up with, “Hey, do you want Felicia Day?” or “We can get you Bruce Campbell or the Russo bros., if you want.”
So, that was nice and one of the many advantages of working with a $7b audio/multimedia conglomerate.
As for the archival clips, once again it was a nice combination of preternatural diligence in deep digging through historical material… and straight-up serendipitous luck. Turns out San Diego State University not only has its own “pop culture library” (true!) but at one point about ten years ago, they received a grant to do some video interviews with a number of the original Con folks for historical posterity, including many who were on our own list of interviewees.
The series of videos was called the “Comic-Con Kids Project,” and they created a website that hosts all the interviews, most of which are well into the 90-minute range. I spoke with Pamela Jackson who runs the organization, merely asking if we might be able to work something out with her for some of the interviews to be used in our series.
To my great surprise, her elated response was that though they had conducted/recorded the interviews and set up a site for the videos, they really hadn’t had the chance to do much else with it all up to the point I called. She was so excited about the idea of putting together a professionally made documentary (audio or otherwise) that she said we could just have all the interviews and do with them what we wanted.
Pamela and SDSU continued to be extremely supportive throughout the process, and we are so thankful to them for their great gift to the series.
Similarly, we discovered that Con co-founder Mike Towry has a site that includes crystal-clear recordings from the very first Comic-Con in 1970, including panels/keynotes with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby, and various others.
Mike had also worked with Alan Light on posting Alan’s recordings from the 1975 Con he had originally put out as a limited edition vinyl years back. That Con includes Kirby, too… but also Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and even Chuck Norris talking about what really happened with Bruce Lee’s death well before the rumor mill had stopped churning.
Alan and Mike said we could have all that stuff too, which was incredibly invaluable to us not only for some of the “big names” mentioned but also because we could use clips from just general panel discussion or announcements and such made at the Con to help incorporate a sense of “being there” at the ’70 or ’75 (or just, to generalize, the early) Cons.
Maureen Cavanaugh at KPBS Radio in San Diego had a terrific interview with Con co-founders Towry and the (now) late Richard Alf from 2010 that I found while doing some of that deep digging I’ve been talking about. This was a fantastic find for us because there’s so much about Richard Alf in our series that we wanted to try to find a way to include his voice, the way we became able to include the voice of other Con principals who passed away like Shel Dorf and Ken Krueger, courtesy the early Con archival material.
When I contacted Maureen about the interview, she didn’t even remember doing it! She was so easy-going about the whole thing and, once again, just let us have the thing, which allowed us to – yes – include Richard Alf, gone for more than a decade, to participate in our series too!
Finally, we Comic-Con Begins team members ourselves are all pop culture/geek culture nerds, so we knew of certain clips and such we wanted to use, and I have to give credit again to our audio engineer/mixer James Bilodeau for adding so much in the way of obscure audio clips that were integrated and really made the series have much more of an immersive, almost three-dimensional feel.
Or, if you’re one of those who consider “time” to be the fourth dimension, I suppose James helped us make the thing fourth dimensional since, really, such clips really help to transport the listener back in time to Cons and great moments in “geek history” via their ears.
MC: As much as it was fun to hear from all these pop culture icons, I think some of the strength of the overall piece is drawn from the expertise of the folks who are maybe more behind the scenes, like Comic-Con organizer Jackie Estrada. Was that a conscious decision, or did you feel a component like that was necessary from the beginning?
MK: We wanted this to be the final word on the history of Comic-Con and fandom as told by those who made it happen, themselves.
As mentioned previously, the bigger-name personalities we were fortunate enough to get on board were great and certainly have helped with promoting the thing. But there would be nothing to promote were it not for the involvement of the tens of people we interviewed – like, yes, certainly Jackie Estrada – who actually made and ran the Con in the early days (and, in the case of people like Jackie, remain integrally involved in the Con today).
Look, it would’ve been easy to do exactly what far too many other “pop culture documentary” producers have been doing lately: Grabbing five or ten people involved in the subject matter, talking with them for half an hour or less, grabbing a few random semi-celebrities or stand-up comics with fairly large followings, a few random fans of the subject, and interviewing these folks too before throwing it all together Cuisinart-style into a mush of stories, reflections, anecdotes, all with a peppy, nostalgic lo-fi/8-bit musical score, executive produced by some (hands-off) pop culture icon of the day for marketing/branding purposes.
We could have done that with this project, and life would’ve been so MUCH easier. We certainly would’ve had the thing done in a couple of months, rather than more than a year. And it would’ve been a nice, tidy hour-long, superficial glimpse at the history of Comic-Con and fandom.
But we also would’ve ended up with something that wouldn’t endure, that wouldn’t have the potential for being an evergreen resource not only to fans interested in Comic-Con or the history of so-called “geek culture,” but also to future historians, academics, media members, and others interested in the full-on story as told through as many primary sources and archival material we could gather.
To create something with that kind of resonance, we had to go to the source, and in this case that meant folks like Jackie, Mark Evanier, Barry Alfonso, Scott Shaw!, Brinke Stevens, Jim Valentino, Bjo Trimble, Maggie Thompson, Mike Towry and whomever else we could find courtesy Wendy’s help or our own collective resources. Yes, their names may not be as recognizable as, say, Tim Seeley or Sergio Aragonés, but they were the core of the Con back in the day and needed to be the core of our series as well.
The rest was just for fun, to add in some “contemporary” flare, and – yes, of course – marketing/branding/promotion.
MC: It's obvious that you're wanting to place Comic-Con within a larger cultural context and sort of historical movement. Can you maybe summarize your approach here?
MK: As I kind of intimated earlier, in a lot of ways this project was/is a culmination of much of my work over the past decade or more as a “pop culture historian” and someone who has made what the Washington Post suggests is a “career” in professionally chronicling modern nostalgia.
Why do I spend so much of my life and time and energy telling these stories that are all inextricably networked into the hive of our current state of pop/geek/fandom culture? Because these are my people. These are all elements of the history of my “tribe,” such that it is.
I’ve never been very religious, so I never really went to synagogue or got very involved in any Jewish ceremonial gatherings. Funnily enough, I’ve always been very involved in the history/culture/artistry/spiritualism of my Jewish heritage, but once again, this was usually as some kind of reporter or writer, or investigator.
I never got very involved in sports, even as a younger person. And I never watch any sports today. I’m not very interested in or involved in politics. I’m not engaged on social media, as I said. I left LA and NYC very intentionally because I just wasn’t into the crowds and competitive “rat race” of those places.
So, although it’s always been very easy for me to remain relatively itinerant and popping around from city to city, state to state, community to community, and although I’ve always been able to find places for myself (and now my wife too) to live and socialize and work comfortably, I’ve always only had one true “group” that I connect with always, no matter wherever I go.
And that’s the soi-disant “geeks” of the world. The fans. The weirdoes who know way too much about Twilight Zone and Calvin & Hobbes. Who gets excited about Universal monster movie box sets. Or the Marx Bros. Or who can read Charlie Kaufman’s debut novel and actually catch every single reference in there. Same with any book by Žižek (luckily, he repeats himself a lot).
I am a Jew. I am a man. I am an American. I am a geek/fanboy. I am interested in the history of “my” “people” and, as with so many others, I enjoy investigating and talking to and learning from (both the good and the bad lessons/mistakes of) my elders, my forebears. With Comic-Con Begins, we’ve tapped into something very directly linked to the creation of and maintaining of and evolution of “geek culture.”
Bjo Trimble is the reason Star Trek fandom happened. Paul M. Sammon, writer of such books as the Blade Runner making-of Future Noir is the reason (for good or ill!) we have “genre marketing” today and people coming from Hollywood to see what the geeks are up to for future content production/exploitation. Brinke Stevens was the original scream queen. Scott Shaw! had his thumb on probably 90% of the animated shows (and commercials and promos, etc.) we watched endlessly back in the late 80s/early 90s.
Though he’s now gone, Shel Dorf is the visionary behind what would become the largest pop culture gathering on the planet, and so – yes – I felt intensely connected to his story, his life, his personality… and I wanted to both explore it (via those who knew him best) and help get his legacy (with all its flaws and imperfections and achievements alike) out there to as large of an audience as possible.
This was at heart about getting the story of my “tribe” out there correctly and with the kind of meticulous diligence for accuracy and nuance, it deserves. I believe I’ve achieved that with my other projects over the years, as time continues to suggest… And I hope we’ve done the same with Comic-Con Begins.
MC: I really love Max DeVincenzo's score. I think it helps keep momentum through the various segments. Scream queen Brinke Steven's narration is also integral to the atmosphere of the experience. How did they get involved?
MK: Max did a remarkable job.
He is one of those ultra-rare renaissance people who can do anything with any musical instrument, is classically trained, wildly innovative, infinitely driven, and just getting started in the professional realm. I see big things happening for this guy, and especially since he’s got such a great personality too and is so easy to work with, I always joke with him that I hope he still takes my calls in a few years when he’s conquering the industry.
Max’s involvement is another lucky stroke, for sure.
I happened to be having coffee with a friend of mine in Boulder when I was living there for the second time a few years back. This friend is the main film critic in the area, and we were of course talking up a storm about movies, especially those made by the small but robust film community in the area.
For those who don’t know, this includes Jeff Orlowski, who made Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, and – most recently – The Social Dilemma. I’m talking with my film critic friend about all of this, and suddenly this kid who looks one-part skater/surfer dude and one-part frat guy comes up to us out of nowhere and asks if we’re talking about Jeff Orlowski.
We kind of pause strangely and exchange glances before I turn to the kid and say, “Yeah. Why you know Jeff?” Turns out the kid – obviously, Max DeVincenzo, as we’d learn shortly – had been hovering around the Orlowski circle and was friends with various people in it, particularly an executive producer we all knew quite well who had just moved to Boulder from LA after conquering the Hollywood scene there before wanting the easier, more natural life in Colorado producing documentaries and the like. (Max gives her kids drum lessons.)
Me being cheeky, I started chatting Max up, and the three of us continued the conversation for another hour or so before we all had to leave. I exchanged business cards with Max, we kept in touch, hung out a few times, and then I got Max involved with a cartoon series I was developing with a longtime friend in Boulder who has an animation studio out there – Pat Mallek of Mighty Fudge Studios (if you’ve ever been to a Spike & Mike’s Twisted Animation Festival, you’ve seen Pat’s work).
Pat, Max, and I really hit it off (endless drinky lunches at the local taco place assured that fairly quickly), and we cobbled together a sizzle/teaser for our cartoon series, CIA Moms! Max not only did all the music for us, but he went above and beyond in bringing together an entire (live!) horn section made up of people he knew (?) and brought in way more artillery like that than Pat and I could’ve ever expected.
When we showed the sizzle/teaser around, most people liked it plenty, but everyone made mention of the music. Nothing happened with CIA Moms (yet?!), but have become so close with Max, having watched how hard he worked (gratis) on the score for that project, and knowing that this kid could do anything and needed whatever breaks he could get to be able to do so, I promised him I would involve him on whatever project I did next, and hopefully would have a budget this time to pay him!
So, onto Comic-Con Begins he came. And, yes, we still continue to get an influx of praise about the original score. That’s all Max (with some innovative and helpful tweaks from our genius audio engineer James Bilodeau).
As for Brinke, she was involved as a primary interviewee from the earliest days, because aside from the tons and tons of other things she’s done throughout her extremely prolific career, she was also one of the foundational members of the Con scene, and thus she came to us through Wendy All’s initial introductions.
Though we all wanted Comic-Con Begins to be as “true” of oral history as possible, with as little interference/disruption from a host or narrator as possible, we did know we’d need someone to pop in every now and then with a little extra-contextual information and, if nothing else, intro and outro each episode + prepare the audience for intermissions.
It may seem straight out of a bad sitcom or high-concept comedy movie, but we actually had that cliché discussion of, “Boy, if only we could find someone like Brinke to do the narration.” We actually wracked our brains to try to figure out Brinke Stevens-“adjacent” type people. A Brinke Stevens ersatz, if you will. But who would work?
It took a surprising amount of time to realize how stupid we were being. We asked Brinke if she’d be up for it, she immediately agreed, and – by gum – that woman worked her friggin’ ass off for us recording our narration, pick-ups, and changes throughout the whole process, almost entirely on her own in her own recording studio she was willing to use for this project just because she was so supportive of it.
We really lucked out, and once again really learned a lot about Brinke and her own fascinating story/stories over the course of the year working with her. I would love to work with Brinke again, and since she makes about ten movies a year, not to mention all her comics, and books, and articles and everything else, well… who knows? She’s certainly always up for more!
MC: I've heard you mention everything from Studs Terkel to Tiger King being an influence on the piece. Can you talk about some of the works that were in the background of your mind while crafting the project?
MK: Certainly Studs was up at the top for me, inspiration-wise. It’s like Alan Lomax’s blues and folks’ field recordings. Or the work that Harry Smith did back in the day. Projects like Warhol’s a, A Novel.
But Studs was the ultimate oral historian. He practically created the “industry,” such that it is. I love his book Working, in particular, and I really wanted there to be that totally objective, hands-off, “I’m just recording, they’re the ones talking” type of feel that Studs brought to the fore in his massive oeuvre.
Tiger King happened to be the big streaming phenomenon at the very moment we were starting to get Comic-Con Begins going. So, we couldn’t help but be influenced by that as well. My wife and I didn’t even have Netflix at the time but thought we should try it just to see what all this Tiger King fuss was about. We were pleasantly surprised.
What my production team and I got out of watching and analyzing Tiger King was its ingenious storytelling structure. It didn’t take the garden-variety beginning-middle-end track. Yawn. It kind of bounced around, thematically, while still ascribing to an overall chronological order. And though this wasn’t too innovative in and of itself, the specific way they chose to do it was brilliant.
I mean, you’re watching Tiger King for three or four episodes, trying to figure out who’s whom and who to trust and who’re the good guys and who’re the bad guys… and it’s not until then they drop the bomb, “Oh, also… Carole Baskin may have killed her husband.”
That kind of storytelling was a revelation for us, and we knew that – for example, in the way we tease the sub-story of Shel Dorf himself in relation to the Comic-Con narrative – we wanted our narrative through-line to work in a very similar way. We teased some of the tensions and ups-and-downs re: Shel throughout episodes 1-3, but it’s not until Episode 4 that we really go into who Shel was and why so many people had so much trouble with him, and the fact that – SPOILER ALERT – he eventually left Comic-Con altogether, despite being its founder.
For more structural inspirations, I also had everyone on my team watch the recent Showgirls documentary You Don’t Nomi (which brought in such incredible nuance and contradicting opinions in such a smart, articulate way about a subject most people don’t take very seriously) and spoke with my team to a great deal about the six-part Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip (which really focuses on the community and people behind the Dead more than the band itself).
I really appreciated how the ten-part The People vs. OJ Simpson limited series captured so much of the essence of both the subject and contextual period of that story, and the way the filmmakers on that one delved so deftly into every nook and cranny of the OJ Simpson trial was extremely inspirational to our team, too.
Since this was going to be an audio documentary, I also went back to a lot of old radio shows that have always been a big inspiration for me, like Bob Hope’s show, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC radio series (natch), Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, and – a real hidden gem that I had only just learned about at the start of all of this – the various immersive soundscape montages piano virtuoso Glenn Gould made about his local Canadian communities (also for the BBC) at the end of his life.
I also took much from audio-based “visual” documentaries like the Amy Winehouse doc Amy, the John Belushi doc Belushi, and others like the 30x30 doc on Bruce Lee. Those filmmakers did such a fine job of splicing together all their audio interviews – some of which were clearly done over the phone or in different formats over a series of years from different archival sources etc. in addition to original interviews – and these all made for incredibly helpful rubrics for us in our own work.
MC: You surely amassed hours upon hours of content that you whittled down into six hour-long segments. I'm sure there were some fascinating bits in there that just didn't work for this specific project. Does that stay on the cutting room floor or do you have any plans for all that material?
MK: Absolutely.
We have nearly 100 hours of interviews and archival material, most of it original (that which wasn’t “gifted” to us from sources like San Diego State University or some of the original Comic-Con founders like Mike Towry).
When I put together the first rough assembly of the series for our production team at SiriusXM to work on, it was nearly 50 hours long.
In the end, my production team and I worked to cut everything down and make the necessary rearrangements (not to mention SFX additions, music integration, archival material, etc.) so that we would have a reasonable six-part show at about an hour or so per part/episode. So, from nearly 100-hours of material to a nearly 50-hour cut to the 7-hour or so final product, you do the math.
Yes, we have plenty of “leftovers.” Yes, there is plenty of room left for a full video/film documentary. I also believe the story could easily lead to a feature film (think David Wain’s National Lampoon movie as a prime rubric). And there is obviously a lot we could do in book form, too.
I seriously doubt many people have made it this far in the interview, so I feel confident disclosing that I’m already engaged in some serious conversations with an executive producer viz. the visual documentary or what may likely be a limited streaming series, as well as a publisher about the book spin-off. So, fingers crossed, as always!
This is the story of pop culture. It’s the story of the “geeks” overtaking the mainstream. Obviously, there’s more to come and more that needs to come from all of this. Don’t worry: It’s coming.
MC: What's next for you? You've written books, comics, movies, songs, and now a podcast. Are there any other mediums you've got in your sights?
MK: Ha, good question. Namely for myself.
I turn 40 in Sept. My wife and I are trying to have kids. We want to finally settle down, buy a house, the whole schmear. Working the way I’ve done over the past 20 years or so has been great for so many reasons, but let’s face facts: It’s just a different time today for Working Class Creatives than it was even five or ten years ago.
It would be easy to blame the Internet/social media, incessant unregulated mergers/buyouts throughout the corporate world (particularly in the media industry), or other modern headaches (falling into the katzenjammer chaos of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock”… 50 years ago). Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. The infrastructure of the contemporary freelance scene has been crumbling for years now. Some of my older friends well into their 50s, 60s, and 70s have been preaching doomsday for us all for years.
I’m very proud of the work I’ve done over the years, I’m very proud of how versatile my work has been, how easy it’s been for me to find my place in all these different media, and usually find a certain degree of success. I mean, I’m one of the many people who don’t even really listen to podcasts, and yet here I am with a very successful, very well-crafted one about one of the most significant cultural institutions of our time.
I love this kind of work. I’m evidently good at it. And somehow I’m able to keep doing it. But treading water is tough. It gets old. Boring. Annoying. Stressful. I start to think about my (future) family. My own health (mental and physical). The health and well-being of my wife. My parents getting on in age.
I’ve thought of all of this for a long time, but after years and years of the same, I certainly have to start wondering if it’s time to hang up my spurs and move on, as most of the people I’ve known over the years in similar situations have done.
I’m working on a new theater show right now with a group of local kids doing their own version of Animal Farm that will go up at our community’s main arts/music venue in mid-August. I have a new middle-grade reader (So Good to Be Bad) coming out as an audiobook original via Blackstone Audio in late Sept. A few other projects I’ve just completed or are finishing. Allegedly, You Are Obsolete, my comic book series from last year and put out by AfterShock, is becoming a TV series at some point in the near future.
So, there’s stuff in the works, there’s stuff happening, there’s stuff coming out. But, the real question now is: Will it be enough to keep me and my family going? Is it time to give up the ghost? Get a “real” job, as they say?
Maybe. But, every time I feel like this – every three or four years, especially right after a new big project is completed, that postpartum depression period – something always comes along to whisk me away for another two-four year project that will hopefully be “the big one,” and I just keep going on the same track.
So, we’ll see. Who knows what phone calls or e-mails come later today or tomorrow? Slings, arrows, outrageous fortune, sound, fury, etc.
Comic-Con Begins: Origin Stories of the San Diego Comic-Con and the Rise of Modern Fandom is available now on all major podcast platforms.