Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave is out for preorder now.

I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior. Please check be your welcome for the next hour. I am ecstatic to speak with our next guest, returning guest, Eric, D. July, creator of the rep reverse, creator of RIPASEND. Eric, we are collaborating together on a project that I've been working on since the year 2000. I am very ecstatic to talk about that later. but first I wanna tell people a little bit about who you are and how they probably know your name. So a big argument in, I think, contemporary culture is woke dead. And I am a comic fan, a comic character. I've been watched sadly as woke took over my favorite DC comics. I i get a good example of this is there something that my favorite series is a legion of super heroes it takes place a thousand years in the future and you have chameleon boy who's orange and shadow lasted blue and brainiac five is green and quistle it's a little spaceship and you have tell us who's like an amphibious thing with a bubble and it said but nope we got to make lightning lad black because it's not enough that we have all the colors of the rainbow and these characters know we got have a black guy in there even on the 70s they had one with an afro and they sent him to another dimension where he was never heard from again now the answer as you and I agree to woke comics isn't anti woke comics it It's good comics. So I wanted you to talk a bit about how you created the whole ripover verse. And whether you think the bigger question we'll get into is woke dead. Yeah, which is a fantastic question, by the way, but similar background where come from just world of comics, people that have watched me over this past years, even back when I was in fire from the gods as the frontman of that band in early 2010 that would see all the comic book based merchandise and everything that I would rock out. This is something that was part of my life, who as long as I could remember.

And we all saw it kind of go in a direction,

various ways.

It was yes, the content problems plagued it,

but also with the issues of the like continuity errors

or rather issues.

There were several different versions of the same character

running around at the same time.

It made it very confusing to keep up with. And you know I got to a point to where I could feel it like myself, it became very self-aware and understood that I was doing a lot of griping and I'm a man of solutions and I've done creative things for the better part of my life and namely as a musician but but publishing nonetheless. And I wanted to be a part of the solution rather than constantly griping about the problem. And so I created the Ripperverse, got a couple of guys that were part of the industry in both Cliff Richards as well as Gaye Bell, Taib, they were veterans, and I created my first character in ISOM and it just absolutely exploded and a lot of that explosion had to do with yes, I had a bit of a launching pad right it wasn't like I was just unknown but a lot of it was the was the vision acknowledging where comics had gone over the last years and just promising the audience having a you know visible code of ethics just telling them okay this is what this company is

about and this is what we want to do and we would love to have you along for the

ride and we went out of our way I mean you brought up a very very important

point in that the whole anti-wokeism is not necessarily an answer at all it

may be more or less like an over correction or maybe it's the same problem

depending on what way that you view it. People just want some fun stuff. And I remember those very first interviews that we would do, I'd go on Fox and we'd correct them. We would say, hey, this isn't about being anti-woven, it's just about being just not that. It's just about just creating. It's about having fun. And yeah, it just worked out. And that ended up turning into RIPPA sand, which we have now, which is the creator on wing where guys like yourself can take advantage of the, obviously, the pipeline, everything that we have. But you continue to own with your, you know, that, that's your concept. And we're just kind of just sending it over the finish line. And it is an absolute blessing. I'm having the most fun that I can ever remember having creating. And yeah, I'm not spending my days on gripping as much anymore. Yes, but do you think that like, so let's talk. I want people, I think don't know their history and there's something that people who are non-comic fans should understand as well. Wokeism in comics is not recent. So in the early 70s, I can only speak for DC, I can't speak for Marvel. There's a character called Green Lantern and then there was who has a powering. There's Green Arrow who's basically a Batman clone and he's just got all these arrows of different things and they combined them. And there's a guy named Denio Neal and it was I think 71, 72 and they decide that's something called relevance in comics, right? So Xcomics, which is about Superman punching aliens in the face and space, that doesn't cut anymore.

We gotta have relevance. And there's a very famous page that they still pat themselves on the back over to the point where their shoulders dislocated, where this old black guy standing in a green lantern. And he says, green lantern, I read this store, the newspaper, and on this planet you saved the purple skins And then you went to this other universe and you saved this planet of orange skins What have you ever done for the black skins answer me that and Green Lantern goes I can't and you're sitting there I'm like this asshole saved the entire universe multiple times fuck you But they're still like Save the world world not enough, you have to march on Selma. And they think this is profound and it's been reprinted 50 times over the years. I think one of the, and I wanna hear your thoughts on this, one of the things about woke is, it's just so painfully earnest and cringe. It's just not entertaining.

Yeah, and that's the big mistake, right? I mean, if you took them at face value,

which I don't think anybody should should ever do that, you know, they're not

exactly re-inv- like well, I guess they may be attempting to reinvent the

wheel, but this is not new concept. So I mean, believe it or not, people that you

live in America, you've seen black people, you've seen Asian people, you've seen people of all different walks of life. It's not necessarily groundbreaking, even for those times in the 70s who wasn't groundbreaking then, and especially not now. But yes, it comes off as incredibly forced oftentimes because it is, it's, that's the driving, it's not even a narrative, it's, that's the driving force of the general concept that they're attempting to come up with. So they lead with that. All of the marketing schemes and plans are surrounded, around this, this, this concept of okay, well, this is black, black, or gay gay, or whatever it may be. And it comes off as superficial, it comes off as cheap.

And most importantly, it's not entertaining. Even to the supposed demographic that they are trying to appeal to, it's not entertaining, because they're not leading with that first. And that's what really started to plague the comic book industry, and really a lot of like many different industries, especially doing like a mid-2010s, for everybody just ramped it up.

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