The grail of WildStorm Productions ashcans – Marvel’s HEROES REBORN presented by Peter A DeLuca AKAPAD

Continuing our look at the Ashcans of WildStorm Productions we have something special. A full black and white look at Jim Lee’s, Fantastic Four, and Whilce Portacio’s Iron Man both never reprinted at any other time.

Transcript for The Grail of Wildstorm Productions Ashcans – Marvel’s Heroes Reborn

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[Music] the demonite scourge will finally be destroyed it’s only it’s like that gentleman said it’s only 705 and there are plenty of people out here already hundreds of people let’s go over and get a few people over here on you’ve been waiting out here since uh ten to four ten to four and who are you here to see kimberly all right obviously curious about my life i i i never really intended to become a comic book artist i went to college and got a degree in psychology and i was

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actually a pre-med when i was there and something just in jail right and and you know what okay always love discover uh look at look at the whales too the texture for the whales is just really cool um the gen 13 archives is a must own because it’s your very best black and white source for anything early j scott campbell and uh glad you could take a few minutes here to talk with us no problem uh just got some you know some basic questions uh some things that a lot of it’s probably been asked before

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but i don’t know if there’s anything that hasn’t been asked um i’ve heard almost every single question you could probably come up with but go ahead see if you can strike me here okay well we’re going to start up with um who came up with the crossover um basically mark and i have been talking as early as last year about doing a project together where the characters hyperforce and wildcats interacted and uh but we were just doing mini series at the time we had scheduling problems obviously and

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we really didn’t have an opportunity to do something together until this year when we took both titles into regular series and we decided since he was coming back with the new regular series and i was continuing sort of the mini series we wanted to do a crossover to kind of give the re-releases some punch and you know that’s really how it came about well like you said in uh wildcats 5 it’s like actually like issue one but yeah it is i mean it’s a completely different storyline i think some time

00:02:40
has passed since the mini series to issue five but i just didn’t want to start over with another issue one right i feel like there’s a certain amount of momentum you lose by starting over again you know you want to kind of break the earth you know sort of gravity and and and take off and really get rolling with the stories and if you’re continually doing issues one two three and four it’s difficult to do that typically first issues you have to uh you know first issues follow a certain kind of

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structure because it’s the first issue and you have to tell the readers about the characters and and introduce things in a very logical sequential way with an issue five you can just go ahead and assume that you know a lot of the readers are familiar with the characters get into a another story that can have a different and more interesting structure than typical first issues i think first issues are very difficult too this pack feels a little heavier wow cool looking void just works so well

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when it comes to to chrome we got we gotta hit those comments we gotta see what comments are coming in if right hold up let me let me just get to my comments boom okay sean phillips very awesome pose there brian sulfrees another restaurants dave johnson not chris johnson dave johnson what am i doing steve jobs johnson david uh pearson both very similar styles of this error very cool grifter like this is a cover worthy image for a trading card jason raskin very cool very cool hellspot rick mays uh okay

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warblade here oh we have our first bonus card refractor card demonite tony harris uh tony harris really came into prominence working uh through wildstorm for ex mckenna are coming off star main j sky camber here this almost looks like a like a delays we’ve lost some delays and here we go aka powders peter 8 deluca here welcome welcome welcome let me uh just switch oh okay welcome welcome welcome so look look everyone welcome to wild storm when i say are we a little blurry here i’m peter 8 deluca

00:05:27
aka pad sometimes known as the eclectic one the world sketchbook champion your brother in arms you your obsessive comic book creator how’s everyone doing i i can’t get this to focus and it was crystal clear coming in from the intro what is happening all right so late evening cheers to all of you late evening broadcast why why are we late we all know that 11 o’clock streams do very poorly they do very poorly but why do we do them why do we look we keep it up to be consistent we keep it up to be in

00:06:08
practice i’m moving it’s insane right now my nine to five you know philly’s favorite it consultant over here the nine of five is i’m there early and i’m leaving between three to four every single day uh a couple weeks out of the year when projects ramp up when there’s a lot of specs when there’s a lot of um you know just like you need the guy in the room there’s people there’s coming and going it’s very busy it’s very crazy it’s high domain but this is uh again

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like this is a part of the process of the of the the deeper practice that i feel like when it comes to like producing comic books i feel like that’s a lot of what’s missing i can’t i can’t get over how blurry i’m looking at this one lens here how is that even possible right it’s got to be some of the uh connection right i mean it makes it literally i’m all over the place right here right now i’m literally going to have to check on face on uh yeah i can check right now on

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facebook can i say facebook because it should say you are live right now [Music] and that’s looking like here we go we’re looking at the fifth dimension here i want to say i want to say it’s not it’s clear it’s so blurry on my end but everyone yeah so look the the nine of five comes calling you have to answer but being corporate being uh heavy on communication heavy on emails all of that fun stuff well uh we learned outside skill sets that we wouldn’t learn just working on comic books i feel like

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there is a pocket of comic book creators out there i’m not gonna name names maybe one day i will a pocket comical creators out there that like i don’t know how you say it they they’re want to be project managers there want to be george lucas’s walt disney they they think their pixar uh they think just because they pay for things they can execute um pain look look i just went through a round of um commissions today a round of commissions and immediately because people are paid up

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front for me uh i got work back like within hours of just like excited ready to go total excellence what are we doing what’s up total excellence just remind me i’ll have my uh my little logo up here but don’t forget to get these uh trading cards everyone right here right there not this way oh my god this way get these trading cards everyone please hit akapat.com but yeah so look it’s just like it’s it’s a total avalanche of a lot of stuff when it takes to make a comic book this is why i like wild storm

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wednesdays because it gives me a perspective of maybe what the possible height is with enough capital okay oh what to expect when you do it all yourself now jim lee was he’s he built the business like i almost feel like wildstorm was like a business first and then these other characters with like different levels of popularity but we have to remember wildcats pretty much a hit storm watch not a hit that’s so similar to wildcats and brigade where almost like brigade had so much more hype than

00:10:15
the round storm watch and then uh it was the brigade blood strike feud so to compare the two while storm and extreme because you have to young blood brigade blood strike was literally a three-headed team dragon created by rob liefeld and you had about 30 characters in those three books alone jim lee struggled until gen 13 became a hit wildcats a hit they got streamlined as a video game animation toys uh death blow was really like death blow was the character that seemed for a stretch uh like even

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artistically to get jim lee’s attention and you know like look we give a lot of thank you to tim sale for continuing death blow and then these other like solo characters like later like really resonated one of them being backlash so extreme and wild storm their ambitions were not to separate themselves from marble it was to become independent themselves outside the marble and later to get folded back in this is this is very clear some people think it’s disingenuous if while storm ever returns to marvel if

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rob livefield ever returns to marvel rob blackfell jim lee eric larson mark silvestri these guys never said they would never return the only guy that really said it is todd mcfarlane so we have these heroes reborn okay now previously we we spoke about what kind of started this and i thought we would continue the ash kane trend here wow cass ash king number five to me this is historic because this is like the finest of the jim lee well um x-men error okay this i like from when it comes from an artistry

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sense a pure illustration sense this is the peak of what started in x-men right here we also got this by the way because we’re going to start doing extreme studio streams okay we are we’re going to try and get an intro for that uh for those streams by uh the one rob lifo we are cheers cheers to rob leifel supreme ash king right thing is so freaking oh it’s it’s something it’s it’s something it is a sign of the time we will be doing the stream on this that’s some nice looking ash canes

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ain’t that right if so we have this return this return to marvel seemed to i don’t know like pissed off a lot of people a lot of people just weren’t into it no one was excited people didn’t like fantastic four iron man avengers especially avengers even at the time they liked these books captain america captain america was on a a much his like a very historic run by mark wade and ron garney and the heroes reborn interrupted that everybody wanted that run to continue it was a sentinel

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liberty storyline so these two guys they strike a good healthy deal with marvel you get paid when you turn in the book we’re gonna give you four bucks this is very similar to joe casada event comics ash marvel nights but it’s like you you do a book we pay you we have two marquee names so there’s just way more money hype attention media everything is aimed up run for 12 13 issues jim lee takes over the rob liefeld books captain america avengers they do this uh city of industry like crossover

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rob lightfall brings in cable into captain america um i believe that was issue five jim lee crosses over wild storm universe and fantastic four thirteen iron man yeah like look i remains a little bit of a wash no one really you know like it was it was okay it was cool kirk busy act later takes it over with sean chen they do a uh in my opinion uh up through is going back to joke aside a joke aside there wrote four issues uh the main versus the main in the armor right it was a main verse armor iron man’s armor becomes the sentient

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being that tony stark needs to fight joke even joe casada and iron man at that point volume 3 writes a pretty good four issue run comes back uh comic book wise i don’t think he faded kirk busiack corrected a lot of problems but then like the movie so a lot of the momentum of tony stark and iron man from heroes reborn it jet fueled the the marvel proper 616 into the movie it really did just as of like what to pay attention to but here we go so what are these got some trial by fire artwork here

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bodyweight kids so what what exactly are we looking at what is the [ __ ] let’s get my ugly mug out of here okay ifkey you gotta go all right so ifkey thanks thanks for the heads up dude so here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to have to do this because here i don’t know stream yards been acting up and i i can tell right now it’s it’s my connection which is weird because yeah i’m on concave business completely unlimited so the window right over here okay that microphone i can turn on and turn

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off this one right here i cannot okay so ever we’re just gonna have to do it this way which is fine cause uh we get more me in the background yes but it’s oh thanks paul yeah yeah so here here’s a i and don’t worry i didn’t say too much i was basically informing everyone why we’re late which is uh i started with the uh stream i’m late because i was couch sofa sofa purchasing sofa buy-in with the babe for our new place uh we bought a very expensive sofa um look everything

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like moving forward we’re going to get back into the the original look and feel of the aka pad content a little bit more streamlined magazine bougie uh we’re still gonna have a fun production room but uh everything else around that it’s gonna be a different environment and this this is a move i was planning uh already like four years ago and i had a series of two year delays but things look things are awesome we’re still like gonna be doing all the streams and everything with the new place but we

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can’t do anything unless we have a baller sofa so that that’s what we were doing today so here here’s the whole thing these are not cheap okay these are practically new i don’t know if you guys can really see the spine here okay these are freaking new so i almost don’t want to like crack them i’ve done previous streams on iron main uh i i highlighted fantastic four a few times i believe fantastic four issue four with the avengers is one like jim lee was so good with his fantastic four work

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but let’s get into it so why are these important well these are important because we’re getting a black and white representation of the of the work of the pages of the illustration of the inking no word balloons but we get like notes there prologue pages one through four look at pertains i love his the the neck here like can i just like bring that up i love the mechanical neck and the traps it is hotness he was on another level i’ve made notes of this before pertacio was in the zone he was in

00:21:33
and this is a part of his wet work zone there was a lot of negative space uh he was very good with just kind of being smart of putting his attention and his time in certain areas and just cutting up the page so the page looked full okay a lot of people miss those details when you talk about portaceo and here we go we’re getting some penciled pages very cool you know like it’s nice to see also where these books were roughly three to four months out because that’s when these ash canes went out yeah right they

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go out to retailers preview order this is where we are now uh you’ll see there’s very little incomplete here but again like as he as smart as potassium is with the white negative space right in contrast he’s really smart with the black negative space i’ve always liked his paneling look at this up these panels here just like breaking and busting up ver you know like i i only wish sometimes i could be that loose you know i’m so locked into drawing on top of the um the comical grid

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or you know the the alan moore great as some people call it we’re drawing good hands here we’re drawing good guns look at this dude just getting his face like his he’s like spitting out all this blood um protect too always strong with the hair with the strains of hair with the hair silhouettes really cool stuff but but keep in mind in this issue we don’t really get a ton of iron we get more of the intrigue look at the banana leaves here right these these are banana leaves i believe

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look at the texture doesn’t come up that well in in the color version like these are almost like i would say the background might be too dark i believe the these pages are dark brown and purple how like how much i can even open it because it’s it’s it’s that new here we go this girl’s just throwing the drink right into tony’s face look at the detail of the splash so freaking nice we have bruce banner over here right and look at these blacks even here it’s like your i almost

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follows the blacks into the negative space of panel four here and even this like you naturally follow this i mean could you imagine being brain and child like the writer and yeah like you you have to tell the story you have to weave it and you get this delivered and what if you have too much to say i mean you’re challenged every word counts when you’re when you have layouts like this and look at these blacks this is a great panel here look at with the cityscape just fading into the horizon

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really cool stuff yeah and then this is it this is like where tony stark like contemplates his uh suicide they they were good with building tony stark into a uh tortured soul early which did become a official iron main troop i would say starting with heroes reborn for the full story see iron man 1 coming soon here we go uh i would say this font could be the uh adam warren comic craft font and we got nothing on the back nothing on the back people i don’t know i just there’s so much about these i i enjoyed i literally

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i even enjoyed like just holding them like the the form factor we got [ __ ] daddy right here all right so this is it the crew they grow this is why we’re here now here’s the funny thing ever everything about the jim lee fantastic four i love i prefer if i were to pick like six issues i would pick jim lee’s fantastic four six issues over six consecutive issues of any of his x-men any of them i’m sorry now x-men one three two three the adjective-less x-men non-uncanny one two three

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pretty damn good but he’s he’s on another level lever level here the point i was getting at i never liked this cover though i never liked this cover i don’t know why it just you know what it’s just i mean it has everything he draws an amazing thing has a great take on reed richards human tortilla torch great action pose for invisible woman you know nice tease here in the background for dr doom it just doesn’t click and i don’t know why but look at this the origin this is all you need to know

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about the fantastic four and six panels shot off into space hit with the gamma gamma stuff uh it hurts it’s twitching and here we go flashback great panel here this is like a michael bay armageddon panel here we go countdown shoot off into space jim lee at his like mechanical finest here you know he he can run with john burn with some of this stuff and here we go we got we got sue storm work in the room being a woman now he did something very similar with batman’s hush where he made vicki vale a

00:27:59
woman again when he did that there’s nothing wrong with introducing your characters as demon guy big guy smart guy woman wolverine looking dude like you know like identify your characters here we know we know everything is happening great cityscape here really nice clouds look at these clouds and here we go we do have our like some like this is somewhat of he’s used this news reporter a few times this is not exactly the image universe news reporter but it’s it’s pretty close okay awesome checkered floor

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background here and then we get ben grimm and johnny storm ben grimm in the g johnny storm in in in the lambo rocking and rolling okay doing what these guys do they are running they’re they’re just it’s fast and furious three over here tokyo drift hey look the racing through the the house the housing development and fast and furious tokyo drift is nothing less than legit but here we go we have been grip grim reuniting with sue storm here uh again really good like economical silhouettes

00:29:23
here this this panel here is fantastic like even scott williams like what he does he break up the legs it’s almost like just like like a duo tone effect sorry i’m trying to see how much of this shows up live but my uh my live feed looks horrible right now i mean just jim lee is so good with these establishing shots here his storytelling and his movement it’s it’s some of his best he pulls away the camera pull like shows us negative space blocks in the panels now like his paneling is so freaking dynamic here

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and we get our little spots about action johnny storm being being a dick flipping people over hitting people with poles but it just looks good it looks good because it’s jim lee’s action we have ben grimm and reed richards held up here and then here we go ready we’re going to get the blast off sue storm round housing a dude just really cool stuff i mean and you and everything’s identified you know this is storm you know this is johnny storm reed richards kissing his lady and here we go they’re going to make the

00:30:44
launch right because like there’s a whole intrigue there’s espionage there’s there’s doctor doom interfering but the actual launch and they fight their way onto the spaceship which makes it even more tragic they added a great element for the heroes reborn fantastic four which is they made the origin of the fantastic four a little bit more tragic because they broke through a wall to get onto that ship and we all know what’s coming we all know what’s coming there we go should blast off i mean and

00:31:19
scott williams too here like some of the the white out effects are just really cool really cool shooting off into space we have double 90s moons here every one every one double 90s moons relax and then here we go they get shot into space we have a representation of the gamma radiation and there we go for fantastic four dynamic conclusion fantastic four number one coming to a store near you nothing on the back which is which is a little bit funny because here right i mean it’s it it’s like this came out

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way before these two don’t waste it back so everyone if you do want to help and support my love for ash canes echoes into my uzi suzy comic book now we’re still dealing with different types of payments via through like woocommerce it looks like the best form of payment we can do with woocommerce at the time just to kind of before we really start pushing the website hard is going to be paypal either paypal portal or pay with paypal or pay with venmo okay um we’re working on uh a portal for any credit card right there

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on your screen just pay like you know so bear with me but here we have uzi suzy first and second printing right here right how much fun is that but like you can see but i don’t waste my backs but a lot of the lessons i learned by by getting these uh yeah i echo into uzi susie so everyone really thanks for hanging out another wild sword wednesday for for the books um hopefully like again like it’s it’s touch and go with the audio um we’re going to be working on driveway fire indiegogo updates coming soon uh

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solid uzi suzy updates coming uh uzi suzy 2 should have been to the press uh last week but you know like again moving scrambling still post covert stuff uh it’s just a lot okay uh we’re still fighting so planning forward aka pad army i love you thanks for hanging out

PETER A DELUCA AKAPD

AKAPAD is a versatile thinker known across Philadelphia, Europe, and even in the vast Multiverse as The Electic One. By day, he excels as an IT Mastermind, assisting individuals, both big and small, with a wide range of simple and complex solutions. In contrast, he is also a talented illustrator, a passionate comic book enthusiast, a creative content creator, and an active live streamer. Additionally, his podcast, “AKAPAD The Film Buff Podcast,” boasts an impressive catalog of over 500 episodes available on nearly every major platform.