[laughs] Yeah

... "What's the 11, 12% that I can...

It's just beer." So yeah, that was, that was...

You know, and it was always rules like that, right? Like, it was always stuff where I was like, "Okay, well, I won't keep it at the house.

I'll only have it when I go out." And then those rules would hold for a little while, and then I would start breaking them slowly but surely.

And, um, and that pattern just kind of happened for a long time until I just, I really got to a point where I was...

I think the breaking point for me was, I, I, one of my rules was I'm always going to end up in my bed, right? And so my, my pattern was, "Oh yeah, babe, just," you know, my lovely wife is incredible.

Mm-hmm.

That is kind of

the ideal for actually building that on top, in Fabric, on top of the different data sources.

So if you've got data warehouses, you've got data lakes, you've got real-time information coming in, flowing into, obviously in this case Fabric, but other technologies as well, you can integrate in with other data sources.

You build that reasoning so that an agent will be able to talk to it and, as I say, just come back to the same thing and get similar answers to the questions that you're asking day to day.

The next one on from that, and they do all join together because you can see they're doing different kind of capabilities, is when you move into Foundry, you actually start building more bespoke agents.

You take advantage of the 10,000 models that are available to you in kind of Azure and stuff like that.

So take the best of breed model for what it is that you're actually doing.

I'd love to know if that's, do you think that's new? Do you think it's sort of been, has been that way for a while?

This is different than what you would get in comics, and I would love to hear a little bit about... what you and Greg and Lyndon were talking about in the beginning that made comics the only way really to tell this story.

Well, our sort of Stan Lee, Todd McFarlane style pitch for this is it's the strangest series on the stands.

And what we're really trying to do is not be weird for the sake of weird, but really tap into a avant-garde history of surrealism and pull that into, you know, somewhat mainstream-ish comics.

You know, there's a giant mechanical spider later on, but also, you know, it's a very...

Just like in Wild Wild West, by the way.

But also, it's a very, you know... oddly paced you know very um elliptical uh story with a lot of mystery to it i really wanted for me if the book is going to come out in singles uh we really wanted i really wanted especially to have a book that if you're waiting a month for the next one you could just keep rereading this one and every time you reread it there's something new there and so it's really uh There's a density of things going on in the different pages of the eye collector.

You can almost go down a different rabbit hole on each page, either because of the overlaying collage-like visuals that Gregory has created, Or because, you know, I've got a snippet of dialogue or a snippet of a quote that you could dig into further.

Yeah.

He, that I wanted to hand out some copies of I Collector 'cause it had sold out at the distro level, so if anyone hears about it and wants to find it, they won't be able to, and he said, "Yes." And then the guy who writes and illustrates Dork says, "Oh, well, make the rest of us look like assholes." And so instead as I handed them out, I said, "Brought to you by Dork," and I handed out the, uh-

What was my cooler moment with the panels.

Uh, so I did a panel for Image books, and I did one for Gungnir, uh, answer, t- books as well, or Image Comics and Gungnir books.

Um, and the Gungnir one was really great because we had a lot of writers coming to it, who then we hung out in the hallway for like an hour, all of us a- answering questions, uh, because, you know, more people showed up than we had expected and so on.

And that was really nice just to meet like all sorts of people, and get, you know, questions about different things.

Uh, and the Image one was really cool about it was, um, two sort of things.

One is that before we went up, I had brought like some I Collector comics for, um, just to give as gifts to the other panelists.

Well, I mean, that's pretty cool, like running into somebody right away who knows your book.

And people responded to it, and they kept kind of doing the song in that way, and then it evolved again into its own song.

I'm really obsessed with comedians and they often will have process like that.

They'll just be, they'll have a kind of jokes that they know work.

They'll go and do them, but then they'll come up with other things.

They'll record themselves.

They'll replay it back.

They'll, you know, so they're all, they're all have different processes, but you know, often they'll do that kind of thing too.

Because then I taught myself that I could do it and it wasn't a big deal.

So Jonathan, for the, for the listeners who are wondering about The Eye Collector, how is it like Ice Cream Man, and how is it not like Ice Cream Man?

Well, I'll tell you how it's exactly like Ice Cream Man, is that the main character is the monster, and every issue is, whether he's on the page or not-Uh, it's all swirling around, uh, in the monster's point of view.

Even if it's another character's point of view, it's someone, he- the monster's also able to have that point of view on certain levels.

'Cause of course the Eye Collector collects points of view.

You know, he's all about, i- one of the things that he says at one point is, you know, he is, uh, sorry, you know, he feels sad for humans 'cause they are trapped in one point of view.

And so Ice Cream Man is, I think, one thing I found really inspiring about the Ice Cream Man series, uh, uh, just overall is, uh, you know, I, I, I don't know that timeline-wise it necessarily made its way into Eye Collector exactly, but, um, 'cause we were done most of it by the time Ice Cream Man was in my head.

But I really think a similarity between the books is one, that it's got a hor- surreal horror aspect to it.

Yeah.

[laughs]

... uh, I really wanted to partake in that experience with my uncles, and my dad, and my grandfather, and just, like, show that I could hang, right? Like, it was, it was definitely this, like, coming-of-age initiation, you're with the men now kind of experience, and I, I desperately wanted to show them that I was one of them.

Like, I wasn't the kid.

I was, you know, I was a, I was a young man, an adult, that I could, that I could hang with the big boys.

Um, and so I did.

Like, I learned really, I think on that trip that...

Well, I didn't, I didn't realize at the time how deeply I was associating being in connection with other people and, and alcohol.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

I'd be trying to figure out, like, how do you tighten the connections of these books, you know, how you just kinda wind it a little closer together.

To me, that's interesting world building, is where you're, there's a thing that has appeared in one story and it actually has a ramification in another story.

Khyber-

My character has to go to Khyber because, you know, she needs to find this other, she's chasing this other person that she needs to go to Khyber to get information and to make her trades.

And, uh, it's very clear that she hates Khyber.

She hates that she has to go there.

Everyone there hates her.

But when something like this happens, what are some of the explanations that experts would look at and consider?

I think the WHO are working on the hypothesis that it's probably the Andes virus, which is quite prevalent in South America and in, in particular in, in Argentina.

Um, and so, you know, b- both of those scenarios, either people picking up the virus before they boarded the ship in Argentina or on the stop-offs en route, the likelihood of people being exposed is certainly true.

We know that rodents are one of the most prevalent groups of animals worldwide, and wherever you've got large rodent populations, there's a chance of becoming exposed.

I think one of the things that's very noticeable about hantavirus infections, and we, we used to see this a lot in Europe, is often virus cases or, or outbreaks would mirror good years for things like, uh, beech tree nuts, so these periods of great production of seeds.

And essentially because there's so much food, the rodent populations explode, and therefore the hantavirus prevalence in those animals increases.

I mean, j- that's just as an aside, but I think the hypothesis of rodents stowing away on the ship is certainly plausible.

But is there anything we should bear in mind when it comes to protecting ourselves, aside from avoiding cruise ships?