Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (00:13):
Hey, how’s it going, Pete?

Peter Wilson (00:16):
Good man. How are you?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (00:17):
Not too shabby. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the

Peter Wilson (00:21):
What’s going on? New Hope.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (00:25):
Oh yeah, no sizzle. No Morgan, they went on a cruise together to see if something comes of it. They’ve tiptoed around it for a while. Love is blossoming. It’s time to take it to the next level. Something, something, something. So you’ve got me for the night. I’m here with Pete. We’re going to talk to Hayden Spar here of Mira and the upcoming satellites. So without further ado, let’s say we get Kraken.

Peter Wilson (00:59):
Let’s get on it.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:21):
Where was my head?

Peter Wilson (01:22):
Yeah, that seems rude. That was a personal attack I think.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:25):
Yeah, I am triggered.

Peter Wilson (01:28):
You did the art. You could have included yourself. Yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:32):
Hello Hayden. Welcome to the show.

Haydn Spurrell (01:35):
Hey guys. Pleasure. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Everything is okay for the time being

Peter Wilson (01:41):
The black screen, but we can hear you just fine.

Haydn Spurrell (01:46):
That’s fantastic. Alright.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (01:49):
Your visual is not quite a visual, but your audio is coming in crystal clear, so let’s go with that.

Haydn Spurrell (01:57):
Maybe it’s just been a bad day for me and I just don’t want to be seen at the end of the workday. No, we’re having internet trouble, but we’ll make do,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (02:08):
We’ll make do. So how about you tell us and the world, who the hell you are? Who are you? Whatcha are you doing here?

Haydn Spurrell (02:20):
Rob, you’d probably be able to answer that better than I would. I talk so much shit to you. Okay, so I’m a comic book writer, Kora guy on the comic show makes comics, but I’ve been doing that for, hi Carrie. I’ve been doing that for, how long have I been doing it? Maybe six, six years. Any a guess? Well there

Peter Wilson (02:45):
You’re,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (02:46):
We can see you. Am I

Haydn Spurrell (02:47):
Not? Oh, nice. Horrible, horrible. Not, no. So yeah, I’ve probably been making comic for six years at a guess, but I could be wrong. Just a writer. I couldn’t draw to save my life. So I rely on the talents of people like yourselves to make my words sing a little. Yeah. At the moment. So the first book I released was Kamira, as Rob mentioned in the intro. That was kind of my deep dive into comics at the start. I sort of just jumped in a deep end, found an artist from Brazil who didn’t speak English. He was very patient with me, made Chimera, which is a three issue miniseries. Learned a lot of lessons from it and here we are. I met people like Gary De Rie. I met people like yourselves and it’s sort of just all uphill. It’s been a wild journey so far.

Peter Wilson (03:57):
Awesome, man. Yeah, your writing is very eclectic. You write across a wide range of genres. You’ve got a bit of fantasy, you’ve got some action in there with Chimera, you’ve got westerns, you’ve got Sci-Fi. Was there a particular influence that got you into that? Do you just read a bit of everything or do you have a favorite?

Haydn Spurrell (04:21):
Yeah, I guess I did read a bit of everything as a kid. Sort of a very generic, thanks Kitty. Love you. I had probably a pretty generic sort of introduction to story. I was a big Harry Potter kid. Talk about who wrote those, but that was quite influential on me in the early years. I didn’t actually get into comics until I was maybe I say 18, somewhere around there. So I was actually quite late to them. We didn’t read, none of my brothers read them, my parents didn’t read them. To my knowledge. It was sort of the explosion of adaptation that led me to figure out just where all these adaptations are actually coming from. And then eventually I was like, okay, I’m going to actually try and make one of these.

Peter Wilson (05:17):
Beautiful.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (05:19):
And so of those genres that you like playing with, what made you go with what you ultimately landed on with Chimera being your first book?

Haydn Spurrell (05:30):
So I guess Kamera, I’d love to hear your thoughts, but it sort of sits in this weird realm where it’s kind of pretending to be some sci-fi elements, but it ultimately ended up being a little bit grounded in many ways. I think it definitely, it’s not a story I revisit a lot, let’s put it that way. I think there was a lot of growing pains in the writing of that book, learning by doing. What’s that?

Peter Wilson (06:00):
Learning by doing?

Haydn Spurrell (06:02):
Pretty much. So I guess for anyone who hasn’t read or know anything about came, it’s about a girl who dreams things that are happening either in the present or in the future. The rules around that are sort of vague as we tend to do in comics at times I think. But basically there’s this theme of trying to stave off the anxiety of thinking about what’s going to happen. So I think that story itself came from a very real place for me and it leans towards Sci-fi, but it definitely, I think I exposed more about myself than I ever cared to admit at the time.

Peter Wilson (06:53):
All good stories. It hops a few different genres. You got some YA stuff in there. A lot of action. Great. I enjoyed it. I read it for the first time this morning on my mind. Yeah, nice, fresh.

Haydn Spurrell (07:08):
Give me all the criticism. You can must.

Peter Wilson (07:17):
So you’ve worked with a lot of different artists, which is pretty cool. You’ve got Ben Sullivan, SPIE, Mark Oliver. You’ve already talked about Emily Grace on verus Spie Again. You’ve certainly helped a few of my scripts in the past. What’s that? Do you tailor your scripts for the artist?

Haydn Spurrell (07:37):
Amazing question. I think that I try to definitely, I’m very much of the opinion that the mean, maybe on a broken record. I’m sure SP’s heard this spiel before, but the artist is a 50 50 collaborator. So I try to write with the artist in mind, but I also am open to their interpretation of not only the visuals but the story. So you mentioned Ben Sullivan, who I’ve worked with quite a bit. We first worked together on Rick McLoan, the Western, and that was for Gary Della at Rie. We actually never met on that book and he didn’t know I existed when he drew that. Yeah, that’s the one. So I think he must have thought my name on the script was a pseudonym. I’m not too sure. But we didn’t meet until after that book got printed and after that we sort of started working on more and more things together.

(08:39)
We’re working on Mr I for Rie at the moment where we’re doing bits and pieces for moose and some torn stuff as well in the near future. So Ben and I, it’s been a really unique experience where I feel like we’re so comfortable working together that I’m pretty much willing to go wherever he wants to go and I think he feels the same way. So he might text me and have just a spur of the moment thought on a panel or a page or how he envisions the story could be improved by just a little bit of a change. And I’m usually all about it. I think he’s a great storyteller on his own.

(09:31)
And then I guess writing for artists too, I probably don’t work with as much is a whole other challenge. I recently finished up working on a three shoe torn storyline that is with Gary at the moment, so that should be coming out in the near future. But myself and Dan Eubanks, I hope I’ve pronounced your name, but Dan and I had never met before. Gary hooked us up for this story. Dan is quite new to the collaborative side of comics and we just started chatting more and more over Messenger and as the three issues went along, we got more and more comfortable with one another. But I feel like there’s always sort of teething, a bit of a teething period where you’re getting to know what the artist likes in a script and the artist is getting to know what the writer likes in a story and there can be some sort of uming and eyeing and trying to measure each other out. I think it’s probably fair to say, but I think that’s part of the beauty of it. I adore the collaborative process. I think that’s one of the main things that I love about making comics is that it gets you in a space with other people and you start creating something that could never have been made without those people in that room or on that screen or however you’re making it.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (11:07):
One of my favorite questions to ask because I’m fascinated by the beginnings of when, so you write Camira, mark starts sending you pages, all of us have no idea what we’re doing and we’re making it up as we go. In those early stages, how did you get Chimera the finished thing? What was your next step and what mistakes did you make, et cetera?

Haydn Spurrell (11:45):
God, that production was an absolute nightmare. Mark is just an absolute treat to have put up with the bullshit that he had to put up with. I was sort of writing these scripts and as I said, it was the first thing I ever made in comics and I was just sort of, I probably didn’t know what I was in for a lot of ways and I was learning about what it takes to make a comic while I was making it and making all sorts of mistakes, whether that be dialogue errors, writing too much dialogue, sometimes maybe not being clear enough about what I want on the page.

(12:24)
I remember specifically, I can’t remember which issue of Chime it is, but there’s a night scene and it’s drawn and colored in the daytime because I didn’t specify that and it made a huge difference to the story that I did have to ask Mark to change it, but that’s ultimately on me because I wasn’t clear enough. So there’s that side and then there’s obviously after I’d gotten all the art, and there’s an obvious point in time where you just can’t expect any more from your collaborator, especially in that situation where I was paying an artist to work with me and while I don’t feel like I’m the owner of the work just because I paid for it, I do feel that ultimately there comes a point in time where you just can’t ask any more of the person who’s jumped on. They did everything that you asked of them and you’ve got to carry on. So there was a lot of dialogue changing. There was a lot of lettering. I was learning lettering at the same time, so it took years ultimately to actually get chimer to a point where I could comfortably print it. I think issues two and three only got printed last year.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (13:47):
And what was that? I’m talking minutiae here. Right down to the, so you have a finished PDF, are you looking to, who is doing whatever else in the scene? Are you immediately talking to Gary Della? Are you ringing up print shops? I’m like, what? That’s the bit that fascinates me. I didn’t know what I was doing most steps of the way to the point where the Devil’s Toilet one sat on my computer for two years nearly because I had done it before with badly beaten boy. I felt I had done it wrong. I didn’t know what to do, so I just didn’t do anything. And I’m just curious.

Haydn Spurrell (14:27):
So you mean, yeah, once the pages are finished and so the story part, the creative part is done and it’s business time.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (14:38):
Yeah. You’ve literally got a 28 page PDF on your computer. What did you do next?

Haydn Spurrell (14:44):
I’m definitely no authority on this.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (14:48):
I want to hear the wrong things, you know what I mean? I want to hear,

Haydn Spurrell (14:54):
Okay, well I think the first time I printed Chimera, so obviously, well maybe not obvious to everybody, but you lay your pages out in InDesign,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (15:07):
So you knew to do that from issue one.

Haydn Spurrell (15:10):
Look, I did my research, so I did a lot of reading. There’s quite a lot of web resources.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (15:16):
That’s where I screwed it up.

Haydn Spurrell (15:19):
You never took research?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (15:21):
I literally sent it to a print shop, no crop marks, nothing.

Haydn Spurrell (15:25):
Oh wow. Well, I didn’t do that, but honestly yours probably came out better because my export was just a mess. So there were panels coming off the page and it was horrific. I think I might’ve, I might’ve shown, I think I might’ve taken it to a comic creator’s meetup that I’m talking years ago, the very first issue one, I don’t think I own any of them. There was no reverie logo on it. It was quite a nice print job, but it was pretty grassroots.

Peter Wilson (16:05):
It was like the ultra collectible, if you can get that.

Haydn Spurrell (16:08):
Yeah, I’ve probably burned them all. You’re not going to say this day,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (16:15):
I always have high praise for, I’ve been at a few comic book create a meetups, and the people that bring a new book and say Take a look is more ballsy than I’ve gotten up on stage hundreds of times to play music, but I always figured I’ve got a guitar and it’s like a shield. But when you’re literally handing over your book and then you’re just standing there watching them turn the pages, watching what they’re not reacting to or watching how quickly they’re flicking through, or was that, I imagine it was horrifying.

Haydn Spurrell (16:53):
I mean it’s probably just as terrifying being the person flicking through the pages.

Peter Wilson (16:58):
Sure.

Haydn Spurrell (16:59):
Look, I’ve only done it. I literally only did it the one time and I’ve never done it again. So I clearly am not the best spokesperson for that kind of workshop. It’s not really a workshop environment. It does on the times that I’ve gone, it’s quite a social event that happens to have some comics lying around. But there are people like Brendan Halliday and Tom to who are incredibly generous with their time and just they’ve provided incredible feedback on and off over the years. I’ll message ’em off the cuff and have a query. I was hassling Brendan even for satellites, which is coming out and I’ve printed a few books at this point and I do it at work, but I was hassling Brendan because there were just some little tiny tweaks that I needed to make that I wasn’t aware of. So there are people like them and there are plenty others in the community that they’re so generous and they’re willing to answer any questions you have and help out. So if anyone is trying to make comic and they have questions about that sort of the nitty gritty side of it, then jump on those groups and throw a question out there. Someone is going to give you something valuable. I think

Peter Wilson (18:30):
It’s lucky. It’s a very nice insular, but very great community. We’re formed here in Australian comic, I think.

Haydn Spurrell (18:36):
Yeah.

Peter Wilson (18:38):
And what is the date you say work, what is your day job? What do you do when you’re not doing comics?

Haydn Spurrell (18:44):
So work in marketing at the moment. So I work on a magazine and a website, so across a lot of digital and a little bit of print stuff as well. So fairly new to that side of the world. I’ve been in that role for 10 months or so, but it’s taught me a lot of lessons I’m working with or I’m communicating with printers all the time, which is a valuable sort of opportunity to even just to get an idea of, okay, what kind of things can I do in terms of collateral for satellites on print, some art cards to ship out with the book when it releases. And I haven’t done that kind of thing before. And I know that a lot of people such as Rob, Peter, you might’ve done it before, I’m not too sure, but a lot of people do like to add a little bit of value to that package and I haven’t done it before, so I am looking forward to getting some bookmarks into those books.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (19:55):
Yeah, totally. Obviously we’re going to talk about satellites. I just use your journey. I mean, everybody’s journey into comics fascinates me. Here’s a question from Dave Di, did you have a completed comic and then took it then look for a publisher?

Haydn Spurrell (20:13):
I didn’t even look Dave. Again, the comics made up, so I was incredibly lucky to meet Gary one day. He rocked up with his swagger that anyone who’s met him know all about and he’s very upfront. He is very forward and he is very passionate. So I think this was that one time that I brought a copy of Chimera, so Frank, I should probably be doing more of that. But yeah, I rocked up with this book. It was a bit of a piece of shit, but it looked okay. So he, through it had some quick feedback and then said, I’ll put this for you if you like. And we just started chatting and that itself was, Hey Pete. That itself was a slow process of, okay, I’m learning. And again, Gary was very patient with me. He sort of had a lot of chats on the phone with me and gave me a bit of insight into what the reality of trying to print an indie comic book actually means. Rob, I’m sure you feel the same way about Gary. I think he had a lot to offer to us newbies.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (21:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And you, sorry Pete.

Peter Wilson (21:35):
I think Gary’s mentored a lot of people that way. It’s great. He’s a good resource. I would encourage anyone who’s coming to reach out to him.

Haydn Spurrell (21:42):
Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (21:44):
Yeah. And you kind of joined up with him just sort of at that time where Rie was coming back in a big way. How was it that you scored being the guy to introduce Gary’s baby, Rick McCune to the world?

Peter Wilson (22:01):
Yes.

Haydn Spurrell (22:04):
I think he took a huge risk because he basically gave me the gig off the back of Chime. So he’d write issue one and I think he’d read a very early version of issue two and he just, I think he floated the idea at first and it was probably early days him trying to figure out what this thing was going to be. And then eventually he asked me to deliver a script and I’d never written Western before. I can’t say I’ve been a huge Western fan growing up or anything like that. I quite enjoy the sort of hybrid westerns. I really enjoy post-apocalyptic stories, which I think are kind of like the modern Western or the forward thinking western in a lot of ways. I think they have quite a lot of crossover.

(22:55)
But writing Rick was a huge challenge. So I did some research and I thought about, I guess what I wanted to do with the story. It was a huge challenge and Gary gave me a lot of freedom. So he obviously had some rules. He Rick, he knew what he wanted Rick to be and he had a basic sort of idea of, okay, we need to introduce a couple of things. This is going to be an ongoing sort of story, but then ultimately he said, but write an original story. So yeah, I just went with it and he was gracious enough to I guess take that script and pass it on to Ben and make it happen.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (23:40):
Yeah, people are falling over each other trying to work with Ben. It was pretty fortuitous sequence of events.

Haydn Spurrell (23:51):
I dunno. Yeah, it’s one of those sort of, I feel incredibly fortunate. Again, I got to meet Ben, I got to work with him on a regular basis from there on out and it’s sort of one thing leads to another. I’m not sort of one of those people that believes that things happen for a reason, but I believe that our sort of trajectory, each step bleeds into the next. And meeting Gary was certainly a really, really big step in my process as a comical creator.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (24:27):
Well, please go

Peter Wilson (24:30):
Since you’re both in the room, I’m curious, how did the colabs between you two happen? You’ve done a fair few projects together, you’ve done Moose and satellites. What was the meeting between you two?

Haydn Spurrell (24:43):
Rob, you can answer that.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (24:48):
I dunno. How deep do I go into it when Devil’s Toilet? Well, okay, so take it back to the start. So I worked at a comic book shop, alternate Worlds. Hayden brought in Rick McCune one and Kamira one. I saw them on the shelf and I read them both and I was like, what’s this reverie thing and who’s this Hayden guy? And I started looking into things and I was like, I want to be on this little thing as well. I want to be in this gang. So I had Devil’s toilet on my computer, I had sent it to Dark Horse and IDW and all those sort of places and got rejected and thought, well that’s it. I don’t know what to do with it. I tried Badly Beaten Boy in 2013. I didn’t know how to break into the scene, so I just let it sit there, enter Gary Deller and Hayden Spar, and then basically there was opportunity to write for Rick, which I jumped at.

(25:51)
And yeah, and I’ve said this to Hayden before I come from the world of music where it was dog eat, dog cutthroat, I want to be the headliner, move aside, that sort of thing. And so my thought was, well, I’m going to write as much as I can and try to be on every book and all this sort of stuff and it’s obviously the gigs are going to either me or Hayden, so I’ve just got to make sure that I’m as good as Hayden and all this sort of stuff. Then we met, Gary invited us both over to his house and I was basically driving past Hayden’s house, so it was like, alright, let’s go together. We’d never met and it was an hour drive and we just got along really well. We just talked about story the whole way.

(26:44)
I’m still friends with all my high school friends, that’s my group of friends and they’re all footy loving, jock type dudes. And I’m the weirdo who draws cartoons and doesn’t follow footy and everyone’s talking about fall driving and camping and men stuff. And I’m like, did you guys watch X-Men two? How good was that? And then to get in the car and chat with this guy that I was like, holy shit, we talked the same language. I’m saying stuff like my thoughts and feelings about the creative process and this guy’s into it. And then he’s sharing his opinion, his side of things, and it was just like, I was like, oh, this isn’t a competition. This is a team, this is a team sport. And so straight away then it became, well, can me and Hayden build the torn universe together? Can me and Hayden do that?

(27:46)
And about the same time, the quick version is that I was trying to get this for Moose thing off the ground with Nick May, and meanwhile I was forming this sort of brotherhood in comics thing with Hayden. So it just made perfect sense. I was like, he was the guy who helped me work out the name for the moose. I didn’t know what I was doing. He was my sounding board. The guy I was say, if I did this, what do you think? I’m thinking about reaching out to Peter Wilson on the first issue. And Hayden was like, I wish I could draw. I’d love to be in the book. And I was like, well, I actually just met this lady called Emily Grace. What if we did some sort of thing where you wrote and she illustrated and we were off to the races. And then I guess we’ve tried to put each other in each of our things ever since. Yeah. Is that kind of now you tell the same story from your pov?

Haydn Spurrell (28:49):
This guy’s trying to step my shoes, trying to take Rick away from it yet. No, I mean I think it’s wild to me that he was working at alternate worlds and I lived just down the road. I was going there, not on a super regular basis, but the fact that we never met before for just felt a bit weird to me, but in a really fun way. So yeah, we hit it off and now he has to put up with me almost daily. I’m waiting for the day where he just blocks me and think, thank God I don’t have to include him in my awesome anthology anymore. So again, I would say that Rob has offered me a few opportunities in the same vein that Gary has, he’s hooked me up with Emily Grace, who’s just a wild talent and we’ve made these weird not quite comic stories that he is been willing to put in his very comic bookie comic book.

(29:53)
And then he’s also allowed Ben and I to have a page in there. And I think that it’s just another one of those stories where you meet someone and yeah, we hit it off. You don’t usually get in a stranger’s car and spend an hour with ’em. I mean we had been talking from memory, we had been talking for a while on message or whatever, but it was just one of those really, really awesome sort of experiences where you meet someone who’s really like-minded and I think maybe all of us in this room can say that. That seems to happen a little bit more often now thanks to Comex and thanks to Ry and thanks to this sort of explosion on the digital side of things of people who, a lot of us are maybe introverted or a lot of us didn’t know that there were others like us out there who were making weird comics. And we can talk about those weird comics together.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (30:52):
Hayden tell Pete, remember we were talking earlier about it being horrifying to put for both you putting the book down in front of people and saying take a look, but also for the person turning the pages, tell Pete about the first you and Ben page for Moose two. And when you showed it to me,

Haydn Spurrell (31:13):
Yeah, I knew exactly what I was,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (31:16):
It’s pretty good. I mean it makes me look, it’s an interesting something.

Haydn Spurrell (31:21):
Probably my favorite pitch that I’ve ever made to someone. Ben and I did this story for Ruth, number one, and the story was

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (31:31):
Two. It was,

Haydn Spurrell (31:32):
Yeah. And Ben and I were both a little bit worried. We decided to get weird, but we didn’t quite loop Rob in on the fact that we were going to try and be a bit weird and maybe experiment a little bit. So we were excited about it, but we were a bit nervous and the three of us met up, we were going to meet for a drink. We met up at All Star comics first up, and we’re standing beside a rack of comics and we just, Ben and I turned to Rob and we pulled a book out and we say, well, it was just a one page printout it, it was a

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (32:08):
Printed page.

Haydn Spurrell (32:10):
And we say, Hey, what do you think?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (32:11):
This one here?

Haydn Spurrell (32:13):
Yeah. Oh,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (32:14):
Brilliant.

Haydn Spurrell (32:15):
So we sort of stood over Rob. He was like the parent and we were desperately hoping that he would approve of us,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (32:28):
Which is ridiculous, but,

Haydn Spurrell (32:30):
And he has a read and then he looks up at us and he is like, I don’t get it. His face has gone white and the smile has gone. And he is sort of like, nah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (32:44):
Well kind of. I read it twice and I was panicking because I didn’t get it and I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t get it. Then I’m like, what am I missing? Am I don’t what’s wrong with me? So it was a very awkward, but then, oh no, yeah, you keep going. Sorry, because it’s one of my favorite.

Haydn Spurrell (33:06):
No, you say the next bit because I don’t know what you were going to say.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (33:09):
Well, no. So I’m reading this thing and so then I’ve made an ass on myself. So I’m laughing now. It’s kind of a joke, but I’m still trying to get it and it starts revealing itself to me ever so slowly. And I’m going, oh wait a second. Oh, wait a sec. And I start piecing it together. Meanwhile, those two are shitting themselves, sort of back to the drawing board and I was sort of like, no, no, no. I think if people could experience it the way I experienced it where it is confusing, but then it was eventually rewarding. I worked it out. That seems

Peter Wilson (33:55):
To be the way most people read that story from issue two. It’s a nice slow burn reveal.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (34:00):
Yeah. Yeah. I think Dave Di was like, I didn’t get that one. Speaking of Dave Di, before we move on to satellites, this show has a strict deadline, so we’ll get onto it in just a second, but I just wanted to get your answer to this question here. Someone going deep

Haydn Spurrell (34:24):
Whose idea was a weird show scene. I wish I could claim that that is actually, yeah. So when I mentioned that Gary said that there were sort of things that we needed to hint at for the larger Rick world, that was one of those scenes. So I didn’t actually write that scene. I wrote the sort of, I think the bare bones of it, but Gary sort of did his editorial magic on it because there’s something there that he wants to build on down the line. Yeah, sorry Dave. I wish I could glean some creative genius from that scene, but it’s all corporate and it’s all about continuity and teasing the future.

Peter Wilson (35:12):
Teaser for you, Dave. Keep your reading.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (35:14):
Yeah, sometimes Gary likes to plant a seed that won’t grow into a tree for a little while, but when it

Haydn Spurrell (35:20):
Does have to pick up issues, 2, 3, 4 until you get an answer to that church scene.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (35:25):
Yeah. Alright, well let’s talk about something. Let me just, oh yeah, this is so Dave, about the clock story took him may just to get it.

Haydn Spurrell (35:37):
Was

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (35:37):
It rewarding in the end, Dave? Was it rewarding?

Haydn Spurrell (35:42):
Just a no.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (35:47):
Alright, so let’s talk about this. Yes, this beautiful looking thing. Talk about firstly for those playing at home, I believe the book is completely complete. The proofs are in your hand and

Haydn Spurrell (36:04):
Got ’em right here.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (36:06):
Hey, look at that. So tell us about the impetus of this idea, how you went about bringing it to life and when can we expect it?

Haydn Spurrell (36:18):
Yeah, so I mean, first I want to just shout out Lauren Tan, who did the art for this. I’d worked with her on a magazine at uni in 2020.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (36:31):
It’s a beautiful cover.

Haydn Spurrell (36:32):
She was a student as well. She did this incredible piece. And so as soon as I started on satellites, I knew I wanted her.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (36:41):
It looks like nothing else you would find on a comic rack. Really? Yeah,

Haydn Spurrell (36:46):
It’s a

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (36:46):
Work of art. Yeah,

Haydn Spurrell (36:48):
I was super excited to see what she’d do. And again, she’s another of those incredibly patient artists who worked with me and has continued to answer my emails. We have this enormous email chain that went forever and she was incredibly, incredibly patient. Anyway, so satellites, I guess. So we talked a bit about Chime, and that was actually the last, I mean, I guess you would call it creator owned. It was the last time, the first and last time I wrote a comic that was purely my own essentially. It was, as we said, it bled into my work on Rick McClean, which then bled into working on Torn Mr I a bunch of other stuff that I’m having so much fun with, even Dark Nebula really soon, which is just incredible. Can’t really explain what that was. Not always great, but a challenge nonetheless and an incredible one.

(38:05)
But satellites came about for a few reasons. One was that I hadn’t made anything that was purely my own in a while, and I think it was time to challenge myself in that way. It was sort of time to think, okay, can I deliver on my own, my own concept and my own premise? But it came with the caveat that I wasn’t in a position to necessarily fund my own book. I wasn’t working the time I was at uni, and it sort of worked hand in hand with this idea that I had a uni project coming up that would be a research project on a topic of my choosing. So something that’s always fascinated me about comics is that collaboration and what it means to be a co-author and whether we even quite understand what that really means for the art form. So those two things sort of paired together to lead down this rabbit hole of, okay, what if I started work on an anthology that was themed science fiction is a genre I adore, and I thought that if I was able to sort of pitch it as an anthology where I could invite creators to come in and create a story up to four pages long with no budget.

(39:45)
So of course that’s always fraught and the last person that expects someone to work for free for me or anything like that. But I thought this could be an opportunity. Maybe people will be interested in jumping on board. So I created a concept and that concept was what if it’s a near-ish future where we’ve made a mess of the earth feels a little bit too real sometimes, but what if we made a mess of it and we had to leave? And what does it mean to try and try and I guess recreate a community and work together and build relationships when something that catastrophic takes place. So the theme itself is wrapped up in this curiosity I had about collaboration, iation, how that works in comics, and I guess I wrapped the theme of the book itself around that.

(40:55)
So that was a long-winded way of saying that Satellites is an anthology. It’s 48 pages long. It features a ton of really talented people, including the two people that I am speaking with right now. Peter delivered this two page sort of sci-fi comedy that’s this sort of really nice little centerpiece in the middle of the book. And then Rob and I, we created a story called Promise, which we concocted after one of those comic book meetups actually, where we just sort of spitballed outside of his car. I jumped on a train to go home and I wrote the script. So that was a while ago. But yeah, so Rob’s on board, Pete’s on board, a bunch of other people are on board. So Brendan Halliday, who I mentioned earlier, I was floored to get a message from him saying that he was interested in working on a story with me. We actually did Marvel method together on it, not something I’d ever tried before, but he was super keen and I was keen and we gave it a go and we’ll see how it turned out. Ben Sullivan jumps on board. So I got some of the people that I trust and work with into the book, but I also reached out to creators far and wide. So there are some American writers in the book. There are some artists who are very local but maybe hadn’t done any comics work before.

(42:47)
And they’re all these stories that I think they come together and there’s sort of this through line, which is that theme of community and collaboration. And there’s sort of this bitter sweetness to the whole package that I think really I couldn’t have produced something that on my own that sort of pulled off what I think these stories pull off together. So it’s been a long process and I’ve tried to be as open as possible with the contributors that it’s, the production has had its ups and downs, but the book is printed. I’m getting a print run delivered to me, ASAP. So I’ll be here within the week thanks to Doug at comic books on Demand, Doug Legend, and I’ll finally be able to find out whether all that work was worth it, but I know that it was because all these stories are really inspiring to me as a creator.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (43:54):
Awesome. Well, it was my first time drawing something that someone else wrote and it was very awesome timing because I then drew something else that someone wrote a week later and it was a horrible experience. So it was really fortuitous that I just prior to that worked with you on something because I was like, I could do this. This is kind of cool not having to check things. What do you think about this? And not being the final say on things. Also, there’s a big get in the book, someone who’s been invited to multiple issues of a moose and has denied her own father that request multiple times and then you reach out and she’s like, yeah, sure. Writing May is in satellites. Nick May’s daughter

Haydn Spurrell (44:50):
Really

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (44:51):
An amazing artist in her own right.

Haydn Spurrell (44:54):
Fantastic. I don’t know how Nick feels about it. We haven’t spoken about it, but I remember Rob and I were talking about, okay, I need one more story. I want one more story in this book. And at one point, Rob, you wanted to write a script. It didn’t pan out, it was just that. No, it was fun. So I was trying to figure out, okay, what,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (45:22):
I don’t even remember that part of it, but yeah,

Haydn Spurrell (45:25):
No, well, yeah, but the idea was that, okay, would Nick be interested in doing a story?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (45:32):
Yes. Okay. Maron

Haydn Spurrell (45:33):
Story.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (45:35):
I wanted to write something for Nick. Yeah, that’s right.

Haydn Spurrell (45:39):
And it didn’t pan out probably my fault. I was in the midst of figuring out what this book was at the time, I think, and there was lots of, are always, I think you guys probably can relate to this. You’re always sort of throwing the ideas around and some of them land and some of them you just leave behind. And yeah, that was one of those that just didn’t pan out. And then I reached out to Brian, I think I just reached out to her on Instagram and Rob, you’d sort of mentioned that she does some art herself and I really liked what she did and I had this sort of really just this one page story for her and she delivered and it’s the closing story in the book and it’s awesome. So hopefully Nick isn’t too envious of his own daughter

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (46:31):
While your camera is actually working. We can actually see you for a sec. Dave’s saying, show us some of the interior pages.

Haydn Spurrell (46:40):
I didn’t actually know my camera wasn’t working.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (46:44):
You’ve been frozen and then talking for a little bit and then Frozen again. But we’ve been able to hear you the whole time.

Haydn Spurrell (46:50):
That’s fantastic.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (46:53):
I shouldn’t have told you.

Haydn Spurrell (46:55):
I don’t actually. So we’ve got some art here by Ben, Brendan Halliday with some colors by Jeff EIS as well. Who colored, got a story here. He’s

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:09):
Awesome. Jeff

Haydn Spurrell (47:10):
From an overseas artist, writer and artist called Ben. I’m going to butcher his surname, but I believe,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:20):
And thats, you wrote that, did you write that story or is that

Haydn Spurrell (47:22):
All He wrote and drew this. Oh, nice. And yeah, it’s really gorgeous. Especially his spot coloring is really special. I think we’ve got something from our very own Peter Wilson,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:36):
You’re frozen. You’re frozen. Hold it for a second, I

Peter Wilson (47:39):
Freeze now. I know

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:43):
You’re back. Show us.

Haydn Spurrell (47:44):
I’m back here some Pete.

Peter Wilson (47:48):
Oh good. That turned out alright.

Haydn Spurrell (47:50):
Yeah, yeah. Look, I’m not going to show you everything, but here’s some sp

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (47:58):
Hey, look at that. Yeah, nice.

Peter Wilson (48:00):
Hey, look at that. Beautiful.

Haydn Spurrell (48:03):
Yeah, I remember, Rob. I particularly enjoy when you go for darker palettes. I think we’ve had this chat before. I really enjoy when you get a little bit moody. So I had a lot of fun sort of writing that and thinking, okay, what’s he going to do with this?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (48:20):
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like in the Devil’s Toilet universe, I set myself, I was like, this is all bright and colorful, but then getting to do other things has meant I get to play around a little bit. Yeah. So that’s cool. So then what’s next? So the book’s coming out maybe?

Haydn Spurrell (48:44):
Yeah. So you’ll be able to get the book by next week. It’s going to be out there. It’s going to be available on the Comex shop. It’s going to be available on rie.com as well. It’ll be available on Indie. So I’m just going to try and get it out there and make it as easy as possible to get a copy because I’m really excited. I’m excited about all the people that are in this and I want them to sort of get their due because everyone is just ultra talented and I think that they all so generous with their time on this book. I learned so much. Editing and anthology is just a whole other challenge in and of itself. So I wrote maybe half of the stories in there, but the rest of them, I sort of tried to play an editorial role and whether or not the writers and artists appreciated that or just wanted to tell me to go shove it, hopefully I was able to contribute something and everyone who worked on it got something out of it or a little bit out of it. I got a heap.

Peter Wilson (50:00):
Well, I found it very helpful. You had some great notes from my scripts. I enjoyed it a lot.

Haydn Spurrell (50:05):
Yeah. Awesome.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (50:07):
That’s really cool. I know Hayden was fretting a little bit about sending notes to people about stuff, so I imagine that’s a good thing to hear that it was handy in some cases.

Haydn Spurrell (50:21):
Yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (50:24):
Well that’s probably a good spot for us to move into the final segment of the show, which would mean, wait, are we doing that, Pete? I brought some books. Have you got books? Is that a thing?

Peter Wilson (50:37):
Yeah, got yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (50:39):
Okay. So Hayden, this is where we bid you farewell.

Peter Wilson (50:45):
We do a quick gif section where we do a quick scribble. Oh, of

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (50:48):
Course you do. Yes.

Peter Wilson (50:51):
Something my own character from satellites.

Haydn Spurrell (50:55):
So good.

Peter Wilson (50:56):
That’s just a quick two minute scribble for her.

Haydn Spurrell (50:59):
Amazing. Yeah,

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (51:00):
That’s awesome.

Peter Wilson (51:02):
And hopefully the other host still did one. I mean Shane and Morgan Spencers are You’re exempt. It’s okay.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (51:07):
Yeah, sorry I was at last minute. Oh look. Getting some nice works.

Peter Wilson (51:14):
There we go. Thanks Peter.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (51:17):
Great interview. Yeah, I mean when satellites comes out, Hayden, this is your official invite to come and join us on Drink and Draw because I would love to have you on the show talk a little bit more about the book, but also have you on while there’s an actual Send People to a place, but in the meantime people can follow at Imposter Publishing on Instagram perhaps, or the

Haydn Spurrell (51:49):
Best. Yeah, can follow me, follow the publication at Imposter Publishing on Instagram. I’ll also be posting a ton about it on my personal Facebook and Instagram. So at Hayden spo, you might get the spelling wrong, but it’s right there on the screen, I’m pretty sure. Yeah. So I’ll be flooding everyone’s screens with it pretty shortly, so I apologize in advance, but if that’s something you want to see, come along for the ride.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (52:20):
Yeah, awesome. Awesome man. Alright, well I’ll talk to you soon. The people out there in the world can see you on an upcoming drink and draw or catch you on social media. And best of luck with the book. Thank you so much for having us on it because it was an absolute pleasure to be a part of and I can’t wait to see it in print. And thanks for being on the show. Pretty easy guest spot for me to do when it’s hanging out with you. Two people I enjoy hanging out with, so thank you so much.

Haydn Spurrell (52:53):
Bye.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:03):
Hey. All right, Pete, tell me what this part’s all about. I don’t know what’s going on.

Peter Wilson (53:08):
Well, we plug and we just give a shout out to a book and indie book, preferably an Australian India book that we’ve picked up.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:17):
Okay,

Peter Wilson (53:18):
Little number, death candy.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:20):
Oh, hello.

Peter Wilson (53:22):
This is an anthology of Australian Horror.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:24):
Yep.

Peter Wilson (53:25):
I plugged the Kickstarter. Super cool dude. Hoping to be on issue two, just quietly.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:30):
Yes. Well this is a good way. We’ll sending the link.

Peter Wilson (53:34):
We’ve got some awesome different styles here. Got some cartoony stuff there. What looks like some photo editing there style. It’s pretty cool.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (53:49):
Do we know anybody who are some of the contributors in the book?

Peter Wilson (53:53):
We have, and I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly, here we go. The guy who put this together just goes by spooky doom. I’m still not sure of his real name, but spooky doom. Look him up on Insta. He worked very hard on this. Hope I’m pronouncing this right. Craig Bryan. Brian Ron, B-R-U-Y-N. We’ve got Tim Burin chops, a lot of pseudonyms, blue pig. I’ve actually looked his names before, but they’ve done some outstanding work and it’s not just comics. There’s some articles in here, there’s an essay, there’s a page of just morbid bits of trivia in the back. So everything that’s a bit spooky, a bit weird, it’s only going to get bigger with issue two. So keep an eye on that series. Plenty still available.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (54:45):
I have a bone to pick with chops. It’s a little bit too close to Spie and there can only be so many of us in this small niche community. So look for,

(54:58)
I cleaned out my shed and I’ve been on the hunt for the first ever picture of the Devil’s Toilet. I know I would have it somewhere, but I’ve got numerous boxes of old drawings. The earliest I’ve found so far is 1996, but in that box, I don’t even know how this was in there. This show Bagg edition of Darren Dill, which I was, so all my comics are with all my comics. I don’t know how this one lone, I had this weird thing when I was younger that Australian comics weren’t as big a deal as American comics and especially show Bagg comics. I looked down on ’em with I got You for free in a bag. So I was absolutely stoked to find this. It’s so weird how things come around where you’re just like, now I’m so thankful to have it and while I’m talking about two friends about friends, head over to the Comex Shop harmonica. This is unadulterated. Nick May, I cannot express to you enough how much I enjoy this because this is the stuff that I’ve been reading from this man since I was in diapers. It’s just marvelous. Check it out. And then these, I reread because we had Shaden on Drink and Draw last week. Shaden Jew Art on Instagram. No, sorry. I think it’s Shaden Art Shade Art something type. No man’s land in Shade and Dew. You’ll find them really cool books. Everyone raves about the color palettes because they are sick.

(56:51)
It just like look that. Yeah, it’s just amazing. Yeah. So those are my pulls.

Peter Wilson (57:00):
Awesome.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:01):
Yeah. Now what do we do? Is that it?

Peter Wilson (57:04):
I think that’s it. We did it well. We made it within time.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:06):
Yeah, I know.

Peter Wilson (57:08):
Any questions from the audience?

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:10):
No, this is no loosey goosey operation on Wednesday nights. On Friday nights.

Peter Wilson (57:15):
If I was Shane and or Morgan, I’d be nervous because my job’s on the line.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:23):
What do they call it? On time and under budget. That’s right. Yeah. I’m lucky. I learned a while ago that this is a team sport and not a competition because

Peter Wilson (57:32):
That’s true.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:33):
I’d be coming for those crews. Dwelling fools.

Peter Wilson (57:38):
Yeah.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:40):
All right. Well this was an easy job. I got to talk to you two crazy people. We’re fine. Is there an outro? There is. Alright, there

Peter Wilson (57:49):
We go. Thanks guys.

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (57:52):
Thanks so much. For those who don’t know, you can tune in to this same channel on Friday nights for Drink and Draw where I do more of this stuff and we even have peed on from time to time when he is free. He’s a busy man. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much.

Peter Wilson (58:11):
Alright, thanks guys. You have

Rob ‘Spedsy’ Lisle (58:13):
A flip.

Voice Over (58:35):
Don’t forget.