116. Duncan Rouleau talks Ben 10, Creative Process and Attracting New Comic Readers

Yeah.

I think that is a fascinating line that you drew from, you know, 70s sci-fi to like 80s sci-fi.

And then like, I guess that dot sort of continues into like the animation takeover of the 90s.

And like, you've got Disney and Don Bluth and it's like very like, I don't know, sort of saccharine sweet in a way while being really artistically pure.

But it's like, you know, all of that sort of edge is taken off Although, I would argue that in the Don Bluth stuff, like, look at all those- Oh, Don Bluth.

Yeah, I was going to

say,

yeah,

I

agree with you there.

Don Bluth, absolutely.

There's always been insurgency.

I mean, animation at its beginning was insurgent.

Comic books at its beginning was insurgent.

Any cool art form that kind of grows up, you know, is an insurgent one.

That one that's been laid on top.

A refinement of some preordained kind of thing.

Yeah.

But what inevitably happens is when something gets popular, all of a sudden it can lose its teeth or there can be a friendly version of it.

And a lot of that edge can get lost.

um and it really is an attempt at least the comic book is an attempt to kind of re-secure some of the stuff that i mean if you look uh you were saying that you didn't grow up with ben 10 stuff but if you look at the first uh series when he's turning into forearms the uh the transformation sequence of the DNA going up his arm and into his eye and all of that.

We wanted everything to be like

that, but even more

so Akira-level stuff.

And rightfully so.