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Episode 471 - Interview with Jon Chad 1-5-22

For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 12m·analyzed·Mar 12, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

John Chad discusses pinball history, comic art, and his new graphic novel on pinball's origins.

Summary

Interview with John Chad, cartoonist and author of "Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball," discussing his journey into pinball through Star Wars Episode I, his creation of the Drop Target zine with Alec Longstreth, his artwork for Spooky Pinball's Jetsons machine, and the creative process behind his comprehensive pinball history book covering machines from the 1930s to modern era.

Key Claims

  • Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball releases April 5th

    high confidence · Host Nick states at opening: 'Pinball will be coming out Tuesday, April 5th'

  • John Chad and Alec Longstreth discovered pinball through Star Wars Episode I at a pool hall in White River Junction, Vermont while teaching at the Center for Cartoon Studies

    high confidence · John Chad describes: 'We were both living in White River Junction, Vermont and working at a cartooning graduate school called the Center for Cartoon Studies...there was a local pool hall...and there was a Star Wars Episode I pinball machine'

  • John Chad drew the artwork for Spooky Pinball's Jetsons machine at full size (2 ft x 4 ft) to preserve as a physical piece

    high confidence · John Chad explains: 'I had decided for reasons that I can't really put my finger on now that I wanted to draw it at size...I wanted this big piece of two foot by four foot artwork'

  • John Chad contacted Bowen Kerins about an interview for Drop Target #3 while ill with stomach flu, mentioning interest in working with Spooky, which led to his relationship with the company

    high confidence · John Chad recounts: 'I got this incredible, like, stomach flu...And I emailed Bowen Kerins...I also said, you know, hey, I, you know, love what you're doing with Spooky. If you ever need like some if Spooky ever needs some help'

  • John Chad used the same pen-and-paper technique for both Jetsons and the pinball history book, only recently starting to work digitally on the periodic table book

    high confidence · John Chad states: 'My process has remained relatively unchanged for a decade. Only now on the book that I mentioned earlier about the periodic table have I started to do art digitally. But everything I did on the Jetsons, everything I did on pinball, everything else has been the same pen and paper technique'

  • John Chad's favorite EM game is Space Odyssey, a Steve Kordek game, and he owns a copy of the playfield

    high confidence · John Chad: 'I think it's called Space Odyssey. It's a Steve Kordek game...I actually have a copy of the playfield that I have in my apartment'

Notable Quotes

  • “It felt like we were its only customers. And we would just go there and play this machine day after day after day.”

    John Chad @ early segment — Describes the obsessive discovery phase with Star Wars Episode I that led to his lifelong pinball passion

  • “I think that there is an interesting question to be asked in the book which is like why is pinball still around? What makes it so enduring?”

    John Chad @ mid segment — Articulates the core thesis of his graphic history book

  • “This is my love letter to pinball. I wanted to like really, I don't think that I am going to get a chance to make another book about pinball history.”

    John Chad @ mid segment — Explains the reverence and comprehensiveness he brought to the project

  • “I woke up the next morning not remembering that I had sent the email and I was very responsible. I was very, very embarrassed because I had written this email in a fever dream.”

    John Chad @ mid segment — Humorous account of how his career connection to Spooky Pinball began through an fever-induced email

  • “The way that the electromechanical works and some of those earliest games is the way that the most modern stuff works too. You still have essentially a relay path that's determining the fate of the ball in some way.”

    John Chad @ late segment — Demonstrates his understanding of the continuity between mechanical and electronic pinball design

Entities

John ChadpersonAlec LongstrethpersonBowen KerinspersonLuke HealypersonSpooky PinballcompanyPinball: A Graphic History of the Silver BallproductDrop Target (zine/omnibus)productJetsons (Spooky Pinball machine)productStar Wars Episode I (pinball machine)product

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball releases April 5, 2022 (at time of recording, release date was still pending).

    high · Host: 'Pinball will be coming out Tuesday, April 5th'

  • ?

    content_signal: For Amusement Only podcast interviews John Chad about pinball history, comic art process, and his new graphic novel.

    high · Episode 471 interview with John Chad on For Amusement Only EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast, 1-5-22

  • ?

    design_philosophy: John Chad emphasizes the clarity, purity, and artistic restraint of electromechanical pinball games, contrasting with the sensory overload of modern games.

    high · John Chad: 'I sometimes feel overwhelmed by modern games...I just like to just, you know, practice my flipper skills and try to master a game...that's a lot easier with EM'

  • ?

    community_signal: John Chad and Alec Longstreth built pinball community engagement through Drop Target zine, bringing new people into pinball through comic conventions and media.

    high · John Chad: 'we were able in real time to see people in our community get attracted to pinball, whether it was through reading the book or us like literally going to comic shows'

  • ?

    artist_collaboration: John Chad collaborated with Luke Healy (UK cartoonist/writer) on color work for the pinball history book, requiring extensive direction and reference materials.

    high · John Chad: 'every single page had notes on it. It was just a lot of direction...He did such a good job on the colors'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.217

0:00
Our episode tonight is an interview with John Chad. John is a cartoonist, illustrator, and author of many different books, including co-author of the Drop Target zine and Drop Target omnibus, and the author of the forthcoming Pinball, A Graphic History of the Silver Ball. Pinball will be coming out Tuesday, April 5th. So, at the time of this recording, the release date was not yet known. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy the episode. What's that sound? It's 4 Amusement Only, the EM and Bingo Pinball Podcast.
0:38
Welcome back to 4 Amusement Only. This is Nick and Ava and we're joined tonight by John Chad. John? Hello! John is here to discuss with us a bit about pinball and specifically his new book, Pinball, The following is a review of the book Pinball, a Graphic History of the Silver Ball. So John, we were provided with a review copy and Ava and I have both read it and first off I've got to say, fantastic work. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, that's very sweet. I really enjoyed it. That's, I'm really excited to have people finally get their hands on it. And you guys have like a physical copy there, don't you? Yes. Oh my gosh. I actually do not have a physical copy yet. Well, but when we are recording this, I do not have a physical copy, but I'm sure I will. We'll see. They'll rectify that issue. John, so you have been around pinball for quite some time now, and you have also offered another series called the Drop Target scene and then a collected work called the Drop Target omnibus with a fellow cartoonist, Alec Longstreth. So what was your journey into pinball? I know that that's recounted partially. Yeah, it's funny that this is in some ways a matter of public record because it's all in Drop Target. Alec and I got into pinball through our love of Star Wars. We were both living in White River Junction, Vermont and working at a cartooning graduate school called the Center for Cartoon Studies. And it was during a summer workshop that we had, we were teaching a workshop and we wanted to do some sort of social event and there was a local pool hall. And we both ended up there and there was a Star Wars Episode I pinball machine. One of the two pinball 2000 machines. And I had played pinball before. When I was growing up, I remember going to this really rink-a-dink amusement park in like middle of nowhere New Hampshire called Storybook Land. And the place that we used to stay when we would go to Storybook Land had a pinball machine in it. So I remember playing it a lot. I think it was a Indiana Jones. So I played pinball before, but I had always had the same experience where I would I didn't have the opportunity to just kind of like really dig my heels into something and kind of start learning the intricacies and like beauty of pinball. Clip text Bur emerge X litter and pinball It felt like we were its only customers. And we would just go there and play this machine day after day after day. And then eventually Alec was posting about it online and one of his followers told him about that documentary, Tilt the Battle with Safe Pinball, all about Pinball 2000. So we watched that and that led us to the film Special When Lit. And then we just started to getting into pinball more and more. And, you know, since we've gotten into pinball, we've obviously learned that Star Wars Episode I is, you know, not S tier. The end of the day, the game is over. We still have extraordinarily fond memories of playing it. We quickly started finding more places to play. Whenever we would go to comic conventions, we would always hang out with friends at reciprocal skateboards in New York when that used to be around, or ground control in Portland when we would go to Stumptown. Just more and more got into it. Partial impression of Out Pinballadequżycz, Stats of the日 The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.

Luke Healy, a UK-based cartoonist and writer, did color flats and coloring for the pinball history book based on extensive reference materials

high confidence · John Chad explains: 'The guy I worked with on this book, Luke Healy, who's a tremendous cartoonist and writer out of the UK, he did the flat colors'

  • The pinball history book covers machines from the earliest origins through modern era, significantly expanding beyond the Drop Target zine's modern focus

    high confidence · John Chad states: 'this book covers not just the modern-ish era that the Drop Target merely focuses on but it also goes all the way back to some of the earliest origins of pinball'

    • Special When Lit
    product
    Tilt: The Battle with Safe Pinballproduct
    Pacific Pinball Museumorganization
    Center for Cartoon Studiesorganization
    Storybook Landvenue
    Ground Controlvenue
    Reciprocal Skateboardsvenue
    Space Odysseyproduct
    Nickperson
    Avaperson
    Leo Geoproduct
    Steve Kordekperson
  • ?

    historical_signal: Pinball history book covers earliest origins through modern era, providing illustrated documentation of game design evolution from mechanical to electronic to digital systems.

    high · John Chad: 'this book covers not just the modern-ish era that the Drop Target merely focuses on but it also goes all the way back to some of the earliest origins of pinball'

  • ?

    design_innovation: John Chad developed experimental panel-less comic format for Leo Geo series, using continuous landscape and character movement as alternative storytelling method.

    high · John Chad: 'The first version of Leo Geo was just an experiment for me to draw something. I wanted to see if I could draw a comic without using panel borders'

  • ?

    cultural_signal: John Chad articulates pinball as rich subject for narrative exploration, with underlying 'alchemic storytelling' beneath surface gameplay.

    medium · John Chad: 'There is an interesting question to be asked in the book which is like why is pinball still around...the really amazing kind of alchemic storytelling that's going on underneath the glass'

    • 5:51
    The following are known, at least by myself and Ava and many other people that I've talked to, for their fantastic detail and highly technical, but also beauty. So, John, you've been working on many different things over the years that have been published and available, I'm a fan of the series of science comics. Yeah. And some of those, you did not do the illustration on that entire series, correct? You did a few different books or... Yeah, yeah, that's a larger series that the my publisher for a second has been doing since
    6:39
    2015 and they will either get a single illustrator author or Pinnacle of the year, the first time I did a series about the solar system. And now I'm actually in the finishing stages of a third one about the periodic table. But they've gotten all sorts of different people together to make all sorts of different books for that series. You know, I'm so excited that there's enough interest in science and comics so that there can be a whole book about crows. The whole science comic about crows, that just makes me very, very happy that exists. There's one just about polar bears. And it's just, it's a very fun series to work on. But yes, long answer, short question, I did not draw them all. But I've done several books in the series. And Ava and my other daughter, Sophia, really know you from the Leo Geo books. Those are our family favorites. I've read those many a time. Oh? You know, it's funny. The first version of Leo Geo was a just an experiment for me to draw something. I wanted to see if I could draw a comic without using panel borders. And I was like, okay, well if I can't use panel borders, then either every page is just going to be one big splash illustration of you know, the court of King Arthur or something where there's a lot of people talking in a trail of word balloons, or Or, I'm gonna have to show multiple shots of a single character moving through an environment. And so I decided, okay, well I'll show this kind of continuous landscape and I'll have a character and that's how I'll achieve this idea of having a panel-less comic. I never set out to make a comic about science or geology. It was more kind of what setting and narrative would fit this idea of like a continual visual canvas. Um, and I was like, well, the, the, either someone walks along a long forest trail or how about going straight down, you know, down through the center of the earth. Um, but I, I had so much fun doing it and I was approached by a publisher who asked if I would be willing to take Leo Geo and turn it into a science comic. And I was, I was open to the idea. Um, but in doing that process, I mean, Leo Geo in the, in the original self published version, he just talks about anything. I was like, okay, well, this case, I guess I can talk about, like, you know, rocks, and stalactites, and stalagmites. Oh, I guess this one, I can talk about the digestive system. And he's still kind of all over the place, but it like kind of honing it in on science. It was just really fun. I mean, it's just and it has turned out to be a really good pairing with my kind of art and my artistic aspirations. What I like to do with art seems has proven to be like strongly aligned with kind of educational stuff and nonfiction stuff. Obviously shines through and works very well, if my family has any information. So you have also done all of the artwork for a pinball machine. Yes. How did you progress from playing that Star Wars Episode 1 to doing the art for an entire machine, which is a monstrous task?
    10:17
    So the beginning of the story is a little embarrassing. Alec and I were working on Drop Target and we were sending it out to everybody that we could think of. Everybody that was in those videos, Tilt the Battle, Let's Save Pinball, Special When Lit, everybody in those we just thought were our absolute heroes. On the for the third issue, I think it was the third issue, we wanted to interview Bowen Cairns. And so Alec asked me, could I email Bowen Cairns and ask him if we could interview him? And I said, sure. And I got this incredible, like, stomach flu. I was like, really, really sick. And I ended up like in the middle of the night, like just waking up like in a fever. And I emailed Bowen Cairns. And I asked him if we could interview him. And I just like, totally went off like, I think you're amazing. I was just going on and on. And I also said, you know, hey, I, you know, love what you're doing with Papa. If you ever need like some if Papa ever needs some help or anything like that, or if there's an opportunity that I could, you know, help out with in terms of artwork, I'd love to participate.
    11:24
    And then I sent the email and I woke up the next morning not remembering that I had sent the email and I was very responsible. I was very, very embarrassed because I had written this email in a fever dream. I was just very stressed out. It's like waking up and realizing that you somehow got the direct email to Michael Jordan and managed to email him. But just from there, I started working with Papa. I started doing a lot of shirts, posters, tokens, different pieces of merchandise and memorabilia from their various expos. And I was just able to meet a lot of people through that and through the zine. And one day I was just online, I just tweeted, I had heard that Spooky Pinball was doing the Domino's machine. And I was just thinking like, how fun would that have been if it was like a party dude style machine? Like if it was like pizza party, like kids at a sleepover, you know, just complete shenanigans, you know, very like a very 90s thing. I just pictured in my head and it seemed really fun and I just kind of tweeted like I will draw this machine. Someone get in touch with me. And the friend was like oh well like you should just talk to Spooky. Like just send him an email. And he gave me their email and I talked to Charlie and it just so happened that they were starting work on the Jetsons and they were looking for someone that could replicate the Hanna-Barbera style. I was lucky enough that they gave me a shot and it was very very stressful but very very fun project. I probably failed out most things. We did a fantastic job. Now I haven't played the Jetsons in person but I have certainly admired your artwork, your photographs. Oh, thank you. Beautiful work. So, regarding that project, was there anything that turned out to be more effort or more difficult than you thought it would be when you started? I had decided for reasons that I can't really put my finger on now that I wanted to draw it at size. I wanted to like leave that, I thought to myself like this is the only time I'm gonna get to draw a pinball machine and I want this big piece of two foot by four foot artwork. I want that like to be able to put in my house someday or to give to somebody or whatever. And I just think the scale of it in a real environment, drawing it by hand, was tough. You know, because if you imagine, I don't know if either of you have ever had this problem with drawing. Have you ever drawn on like a really big surface and when you draw and you are getting further and further away from yourself, it looks fine when you're sitting there, but then you stand up and look at it and like the perspective has changed? Like someone's head that you thought you drew this big, you know, is now two times as tall. Yeah. It's like how they write the word stop on the road really long, so like from the car it looks right. So I was running into that problem a lot, is that things were kind of getting loosey goosey in perspective.
    14:41
    So yeah, everything just involved with drawing big was a struggle. Yeah, perspective is hard. Do you like to draw, Ava? Yes. She's actually in an art school. Yeah. How cool!
    14:58
    This is a turning the tables interview. What sort of art is your like kind of preferred medium or style? I like
    15:09
    sketching the most and I'd love to trade things which is random. I also like to do a lot of watercolor.
    15:21
    I admire how watercolor looks so much, but I just don't have I'm I'm... something in my brain doesn't like connect. Watercolor requires a lot of time to like just leave it and dry. And you're like, okay, now I have to go finish that, dry it again, and then do it again. Over and over. But yeah, it's fun. I really enjoy it. For your sketching, do you like to use like pencil, charcoal? What's your favorite sketching implements? I used charcoal before. I don't currently own any, but I just normally just sketch with pencil. I like to use the drawing pencils like 4B and 2B. Those are my favorites. Yeah, something nice and soft, real buttery. I've, um, for years and years I've used a 4H pencil to do my comics, uh, because I have a really heavy hand, and when I was using things like a 2B or a 4B, I was having a hard time erasing them, because they were just leaving these, like, super dark marks. I mean, the only problem is that a pencil that hard does leave, like, divots in the paper. Lines, yeah. But I don't know. I mean it's it's Out of those two like ones. Yeah, I'd rather have just like the light lines. Oh, well, that's that's really cool. Uh,
    16:46
    Sorry, just taking up an art talk break No, no Yeah, I'm very proud of Ava and everything she's able to do. I
    16:57
    We a little behind the scenes John and I talked a few days ago And I was telling him that I can't even draw a stick figure
    17:06
    You're a John StickFaker. I, you know, if pressed. But, um, yeah, so this is all years beyond my capability and understanding. Um, so, uh, John, speaking of, um, after you did the work for Spooky on the Jetsons Pinball Machine, What made you decide to write about pinball in a long-form comic like Pinball and Graphic History of the Silver Ball? That book is really kind of a continuation of the journey that Alec and I set out to do. You know, and we were able in real time to see people in our community get attracted to pinball, whether it was through reading the book or us like literally going to comic shows . That we created and putting pinball in front of them And sometimes also just the sort of thing where we would say pinball and we would see people light up and be like oh my God I used to play you know in pinball who maybe only had a tangential bit of information about it
    18:15
    And also communicate this really interesting story. But like, that's only one part in an interesting chronology of what is ultimately a very interesting and unique game. I think that there is an interesting question to be asked in the book which is like why is pinball still around? What makes it so enduring? I know the answer to that and you know the answer to that. I think it's an interesting question to pose to someone who is not into pinball and who looks at it and kind of they just see the plywood box and the ball rolling up and down the ramp. The history they don't see The the really amazing kind of alchemic Storytelling that's going on underneath the glass and so kind of lifting the veil and showing all that to somebody is You know why I think I wanted to make the book and this book covers Not just the modern ish era
    19:16
    That the drop target merely focuses on But it also goes all the way back to some of the earliest origins of pinball. And I wanted to call out a few things about this book. First of all you have, not in a bad way, in a good way. This is extraordinarily smart and I'm just about to get absolutely fact checked here. No, no, no. The beauty in this book is that you have really lovingly illustrated a lot of early electromechanical and mechanical ball machines. That is something which I have not seen done in a comics medium for sure and very many other mediums either. There's not a lot of appreciation in Literature or artwork that's made in modern times for the older games and especially those early ones where there's not, you know, somebody screaming at you to make a shot or loud blaring music or, you know, lights flashing all the time. It's about the purity of the gameplay, you know, can the ball make it? This one little cup that's worth a dollar, if you hit that, and then if you land anywhere else, you are completely void and you have to start over again. So I am just so impressed in reading this book and flipping through it, seeing the playfield layouts More tips and link in the description below this video coloca performances??
    21:42
    Oh, thank you. You know, it's, um, and sometimes it was, uh, tricky, uh, just from a drawing standpoint because I worried that I was venturing into the territory of diminishing returns, right? Like, uh, one of the beauties of comic storytelling is that I can have two rectangular boxes with four legs and that can read as the idea of pinball, right? I think that there's some people in comics that would argue, do I need to draw every pin in William's Contact? Probably not. But this is my love letter to pinball. This is the I wanted to like really, I don't think that I am going to get a chance to make another book about pinball history. And so I wanted to give these machines the reverence that they are due. You know, and unfortunately, one of my things that I and Nick, we talked about this last time we chatted. And one of the things I wrestled with is How do I pick? You know, when I... Obviously, you gotta show Ballyhoo. But like, you know, and you gotta show Williams Contact, it's the first game with electricity. But then you have, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of games to pick from. And, you know, part of my process of kind of weeding through all of these games is like, okay, well which ones do I want to show? Some of it was like, well, that looks fun to draw. Some of it was, okay, well this, I think, is really exciting and I'm not sure if that resonates with like the sensibilities of today's designers. And some of them was just what images do I have access to? You know, I have a whole shelf back here. This is great for a podcast. I have a great, I have a whole shelf back here that's full of pinball books. And pinball books by and large are usually just laden with photos, which is wonderful. But there's a limit, you know. Again, hundreds and hundreds of machines were coming out in the 1930s. I'm at the mercy of what I have access to both in physical and in digital formats. So sometimes that was and so that's That was a defining feature of what I could draw what I couldn't draw, but it was tough to think like, okay Well, is this the best example like, you know with Chicago Express really the game for me to show, you know, is there some other You know pure mechanical machine that is like a better example of this or that or you know No I'm avid reader of storytelling, and I would say advertisements to the Weirdicating4 فيтérer이�urity Johnson Many interviews and you call those out in the book itself. But you and I had talked about electromechanical games and how they function, specifically how score tallying works and that kind of thing. One of the things that I'm fascinated by is the evolution of electronic and mechanical design. Oh, sure. Did that help solidify part of that evolution for you? Yeah, oh absolutely. I was completely mystified. I'd been to the Pacific Pinball Museum and seen their see-through machine. Like I'd seen it all work, but it still just really mystified me as to how everything was strung together and what was the sequence. And I think that's the thing that you really illustrated for me and really kind of helped solidify in my head was that it is deceptively linear. You know, it is like a single thing pulsing through different components. And I could start seeing how if you imagine you have a train going from, you know, LA to Chicago, that's like your Williams Contact, right? A non-stop train, right? You got it's an electrical pulse, The end goal is still creating some effect, but they're adding all these things in between. At least that's how the relays felt to me. It felt a little bit as a choose your own adventure path, but mostly as like, okay, well, then when this hits, it triggers this, which triggers this, which triggers this, which triggers this. The next time you hit it, it triggers this which triggers this which triggers that. And you know, I'm sure this is seeming wildly elementary, but for me it was really helpful to think of it that way. In some ways it made Solid State at the end of our conversation feel more mystifying than electromechanical. As it should be. But the kind of the cool thing is that the way that the electromechanical works and some of those earliest games is the way that the most modern stuff works too. You still have essentially a relay path that's determining the fate of the ball in some way. It's just those relays are now code instead of physical relays. And more confusing language than... John, have you played a lot of electromechanical pinball? Have I played a bunch? I've played a fair amount. I am in love with the collection that the Pacific Pinball Museum has. When I moved out here, I was able to go a couple of times before the pandemic hit, and I'm really, really aching to go back. But yeah, I enjoy them quite a bit. I enjoy just the clarity You know, the pinball on a whole is cacophonous, but I sometimes feel overwhelmed by modern games. If I'm in a certain mindset, I just like to just, you know, practice my flipper skills and try to master a game. And I just feel sometimes that's a lot easier with you. John, that was a perfect answer.
    28:01
    That's exactly how I feel about electromechanical games as well. Do you have a particular favorite game that you like to play? What attracted you in particular? I think it's called Space Odyssey. It's a Steve Kordek game that has like these two, it has like a drop to a spot or a stand up target in the middle that goes back and forth and then has these two scoops or saucers I guess that will shoot the ball out towards the I like it for selfish reasons. One is because I actually have a copy of the playfield that I have in my apartment, which I really enjoy looking at. I have a bunch of different playfields that just gave me a lot of power while I was drawing the book. But also there's just, yeah, there's just something that I just, it just clicks with me. That game just really feels good. There's something about like getting the ball in one of those saucers and then having it shoot out, hit the stand up target and then go into the other saucer. And I've gotten it where it's done that like five or six times and I just feel like I'm the king of the world. I feel so good. And also I just, the art on the back glass is amazing. And the The playfield art is refreshingly restrained, which is something that I really admire in the EM games in that era, or even some of the early 80s stuff. Like, you take off all the parts of high speed and there's like, I mean, there's not a lot on that playfield, but it's like such an amazingly huge artistic achievement.
    29:50
    Sorry. No, no. Perfect. Do you have any particular wood rail games or two inch flipper games? I don't know that I could identify one from my memory. I know. I know.
    30:12
    Get this pandemic over with so you can get back to the Pacific Pinball Museum. I'm a killer collection of wood rails from 1954 in particular. So next time you're down there. Back to the book a bit here. Oh, not off topic. We've already had one art diversion here, but I was wondering if we could take another one and talk a bit about your process and how it might have evolved from the work that you did in the dropbox. I'm targeting through pinball. Sure. My process has remained relatively unchanged for a decade. Only now on the book that I mentioned earlier about the periodic table have I started to do art digitally. But everything I did on the Jetsons, everything I did on pinball, everything else has been the same pen and paper technique. So I'll draw thumbnails on regular copy paper and I really like to use a ballpoint pen just to force myself to not erase. You know, really commit myself to whatever the sketch is and if I don't like it, cross it out, go to the next one. And so I'll do that. I usually do pages, if I'm doing comic pages, I'll do them in groupings of like four to six. Just so that I don't get overwhelmed, right? So I can look at a group of four pages, six pages and say like, okay, well that's a unit. In this group, what do I want to accomplish? And it's just more manageable for me than looking at 200 pages and thinking, okay, well, how do I manage this huge thing? And also in six-page increments, I can be very purposeful about my page turns. In comics, there's this really amazing storytelling opportunity on the page turn where you can, like, change scenes or change chapters or, you know, have a big reveal where, you know, you have a ball teetering on the in-lane or out-lane. Termtext I'm not going to draw in feet. That did not come up in pinball. I didn't have, although I should have, I should have had someone kicking the machine. It's really weird. I am just like weird. They're like triangle rectangles. Don't make sense. Yeah, yeah. The thing that gets me is like whatever that front the like the the front pad of your foot. Right after the toes. Yeah, well, is that the ball? Yeah, I guess not the ankle but the ball. Yeah, too. So that's I'm going on me and art. Oh, man. You probably know, uh, uh, God Drawing Anatomy better than I do, uh, because I definitely absorbed, uh, my anatomy from, uh, years of watching Dragon Ball Z and anime. Me too. I watch a lot of anime too, so. We'll, uh, we'll sidebar about that. Yeah. Um, anyway, so now I've, I've, I've ruined the hands on my page several times and the, and the feet that I've drawn. So I've corrected them, everything looks fine. So then I bring in my inking implements and I use a series of technical pens, microns, some of these, what I got here, a Copic multiliner for my panel borders. And then the primary tool that I use to do my figure drawing, my effects drawing, and some of the art on the pinball machine is a dip pen. I use a CrowQuill Hunt 102. I've been using this for years. You get these little nibs that you stick into the holders. Spring on the morning and then K What's your favorite Hi to all of you And like you don't bother if it's for the It's free So that's because It was oat The next thing I do is I make the ink lines as dark as possible, even though you might think that all ink is black, if you actually zoom in on Micron ink vs Sharpie ink vs Copic ink vs India ink, they're all different types of black, and so homogenizing all of those lines and bitmapping them so that they're nice and pixel perfect means that they'll print really sharp and really, really nice. probτεeast educación kazächBSctoralhi 빨리baupday cemeteryliuice, sfhy Rapt Entwicklung changesfLetters w7a ⚎ARplace4jj50 PyFamsoFние clicQ Leafgh周き masih must yjHiWixbaeqbIša geral давQwO4gvowO axisbxhAr义5 nets maturity autograph excecgere refractalityA3zlc稱 nächste article's bandy Grace prefind Song american ae5gs brb ZILCtxtroiknle Kent쵙으c 2012 Kon acuerdo, wowzor ae4a–'s–³登録 & sub hesitation. The color there's there's a step called flatting which is a rudimentary understanding and
    35:53
    The the flatting is is finding areas that Have similar color and then marking them and then that preps it for the final color Yeah there there kind of two versions of flatting I think kind of the literal sense is what you indicating where it like okay Well Say you were drawing like me I currently sweatshirt and you know You would take all of those areas maybe not the ones that are connected But you know if there's a line here that's disconnecting this area like everything will be colored a color Not necessarily even blue though, so that when I look at the page, I'm like, oh all of the sweatshirt is the same color Good for me, you know Click, click, click. And just makes it easier. And it's basically like setting up the artist to make easier and quicker decisions. Because they're not having to go in, you know, and color in 50,000 strands of hair. All the hairs are already the same color. They might be purple or pink or, you know, what not what you intend as the final product to be. So that's I think the literal definition of flatting. The guy I worked with on this book, Luke Healy, who's a tremendous cartoonist and writer out of the UK, He did the flat colors so he not only did that but then he chose colors and applied them to those areas and he did those based on just an incredible mountain of reference materials I gave him. You know this machine is this but I also told him when to back off you know I would say listen this panel I'm sorry it needs to be like pretty much perfect because that's like what feels good to me like it's a zoomed in shot of Jurassic Park. I need to see like the color on the T-Rex, you know, and then sometimes I would have a shot of a couple of machines with glass over the playfield and I would just say, you know, just draw it blue, like, you know, obscure what's underneath the playfield with color. And he he did a tremendous job. He did such a good job on the colors. I felt so bad.
    37:56
    Just for giving them all the material. I had to create this code. Normally I've worked with Luke before and I'll give him a printout of the book in inks and I'll have little notes on it that say like this should be this color, this should be this, this should be a gradient. But maybe over the course of a book there's like 20 of those and this book, every single page had notes on it. It was just a lot of direction. slightly to God, Lub Antharter switchedBritannians inرا, crimson ink38真的 ni eokt- I've really learnt to be eaky in-office later this year for myself in my determination, I am working hard for an zurückie note没有 ilha lakson-?? Do you do any corrections to the actual artwork at that point or have you tried your best to make sure all the corrections are done in the inking phase? One of the reasons why I think historically the comic process has been divided up into that thumbnail, pencil, ink steps is to kind of eliminate those larger game changer mistakes. Um, you know, hopefully someone has read the book at the pencil stage and seen a backwards hand or a, you know, or a machine that's just not of the right era. You know, I was really, uh, assertive about sending this book out to a lot of different people at different stages so that I could avoid something big like that. Typically the changes that would kind of come down were mostly text changes. I think that there were I think there was like a couple of
    40:17
    There's a there's a term in art called a tangent The same thing is like in math. You have a line intersecting the circle at one point but in art it's like when two visual forms get close but either are touching just touching or not quite touching and it can create moments of visual tension that pull you out of the illusion of comics and And so sometimes I would have word balloons where the edge of the word balloon looks like sitting on the side of someone's head. And then it just kind of ruins the illusion. Suddenly you're like, oh, I'm not. This isn't the illusion of sound. This is a floating white balloon balancing on someone's head.
    40:58
    So because I did the lettering separately, I did an InDesign and I did the word balloons on a separate piece of paper and scanned them in because there was that disconnect. Sometimes something like that would happen. So that was like kind of the biggest edits that I would have to do besides text. Which layout are you most proud of if you had pick one of the
    41:23
    most Over 200 pages. Is that right? Yeah, 200, 208 pages. Um So there's a lot of layouts in this that I look back on and I I'm really shocked that I had the energy to draw all the details.
    41:44
    And I think I look at them and I'm like, oh, wow, that's a that's a great drawing. I'm really proud of that drawing. But in terms of like the content, I really have a soft spot for like 60 to 62. I'm talking about like tilt mechanisms. And I just I feel as if I'm like a lot of the the The, this kind of idea of combining comics and pinball really starts to like hit home. Specifically on like 62 I'm talking about like how the different shakes work, the idea of like shaking a pinballmachine vertically versus horizontally and integrating like the moving the very panels of pinball as if they were the machine just feels, it felt really good. That just still resonates with me. There's some stuff on 72 where I'm talking or 74. I think where I'm talking about like the orientation of the flippers, you know, between Humpty Dumpty, Triple Action, Spot Bowler and how that like actually changes where you can reach on the playfield. And that's just that sequence just feels good still. It just really, really works. And then the last one is like a real standout as like just a personal favorite is on 125. I'm talking about kind of the evolution of arcades and what they went through in the late seventies and early eighties and how pinball kind of fits The end of the story. And ultimately how video games fit into pinball story. And I just did this one page where I really started stylizing not only pinball machines and arcade machines, but also like arcades themselves. And it just feels really satisfying. I think that one of my fears when I first started working on this book was that I was going I'm going to be doing a book about a very kinetic and vivacious and lively game that is housed inside of a rectangular box that is a not terribly exciting physical object. I mean, just the silhouette is different, sure, and obviously for us people who love and can recognize that silhouette, it fires different synapses, but if I take two boxes and just stack one on top of the other, that's not exciting necessarily. And an arcade as just a boxy building is not exciting, necessarily. So I really enjoyed, you know, kind of warping the buildings and making them kind of more stylized and stuff. It just felt really good. That fourth panel of the arcade still feels really good. Fryderyk Wielanowski It looks really good too. John Papadiuk Oh, thank you! Going back to the flipper trajectory illustration and then on the following page you've got the playfields colored in such a way that it shows the entirety that can be covered by the flippers. Is that the portion that you're talking about or are you talking about the single panel with the angles of the flipper that are coming off the arrows? Page 72, there's just something about the layout that really sings to me, kind of having those pullout panels, those like micropanels with the titles of the games, the creators above them. That first panel there that has that guy superimposed over the section of the Humpty Dumpty ad, that feels really good. But yeah, I, I, 74, those two top panels where I have this kind of colored area that represents what is maybe not the literal, but the kind of estimated areas of the playfield that one could achieve purchase with the flippers on Humpty Dumpty versus Spot Bowler. It's really funny. I mean, it really, the two flippers in the bottom in the Spot Bowler position has like really So, I just think that wasn't a goal, you know, when Harry Mabbs was making it, like maybe he wasn't like, oh, I want this to be a game that's played indefinitely. Maybe he just wanted it to, you know, have some fun flipping back and forth across the table, so. Interpret señora android madness The idea wasn't there one day and it was there the next. And it stands to reason that like there was something else in the gaming sphere that achieved this very thing involving a ball and a playfield. And it just was a matter of like putting the two ideas together. The real advance was the electrical control and the shape. It was very refined especially compared to a traditional pitch and pad. Very cool, the evolution and of course it's totally visible in your artwork. It's amazing. So, for listeners who would like to buy Pinball, a graphic History of the Silver Ball, or any of your other work, how can they best accomplish that goal? There is a link to the Macmillan page for the book, which is kind of the overarching umbrella publisher of For a Second. You can find that by going to johnchad.com. Text John with no H. And there's a link right on the front page that can take you to the pinball page where you can preorder the book at a number of different online vendors. Currently, as of the time of this recording, the only place that I know of that you can preorder the book IRL, well you can, it's in the Diamond Preview catalog, so you can go to your comic book shop and just request, you can request it. I think you can also go to your local brick and mortar store. But I know for a fact that if you're looking for a place that's local that will ship, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia has a preorder page for the book because of an event that I'm doing later in February. By the time of this release, that event might have already happened. But you can get to that page by going to www.tinyurl.com slash pin event one. And I'll make sure that's linked in the show notes along with johnchad.com. Ava, actually, this question is more directed to you. So, obviously I've been obsessive about pinball and pinball history and so forth for many years here and you've certainly had that ingrained in you from an early age. You've worked on games and so forth. What were your thoughts about the book? I was just like, wow, this is taking so much time, and so much effort, and this is So cool and I hope I can draw like this and yeah my hopefully one day I'll get to draw or design pinball that would be fun. Oh my gosh yes please that would be amazing. That's very thank you so much. I you know when you said when you called out specifically Williams Contact as like the game that you like were like oh that seems extraordinarily precise That's like... that just made me so happy. I could have made the book with far less details. I could have put one line instead of five lines on a given machine. But I wanted a range of people to be interested in this. And, you know, because some of this stuff I think is going to be material that pinball people have heard before. They've heard the Roger Sharpe story. They've heard tilt, a battle to save pinball. They know that Humpty Dumpty is the first game with flippers. Well, what can I provide to them? And in that case, it's a lavishly illustrated love letter of these extraordinarily complicated and fascinating pieces of, you know, gaming history. The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.
    52:16
    Key of Homer � 운동 I think that you give definitions in the back, a glossary of different pinball terms. I think that's important, especially when you're talking about these kind of in the weeds kind of details about playing or how different mechanisms function and so forth. So, you know, that kind of details and that attention to detail, not just I don't know if you've put that in your illustrations, but in the entire process really strikes a chord and thank you. I think you've done a fantastic job, John. John Papadiuk, Black Water databases, just to thank you. All that back stuff—I have some sections in the back where I talk about different moves and kind of what are the next steps—because again all I want to be is that same entry point that various things like tilt, the battle is a pinball, The Winlet or the, um, uh, um, gosh, what is the Brenda Coleman Sam Spool Multiball Magazine? Like, us getting Multiball Magazine in the mail, uh, was like a total, you know, game-changing error. Reading, um, Match, uh, the, the old pinball zine, uh, that stuff is like really exciting. And so I don't have any illusions that like a young kid is to like pick up the book and then like literally bring the physical book to a, a, I'm not a pinball machine. I'd be like, okay, what does John say about starting a game? But I want to at least hopefully arm someone with the knowledge so that they don just go up to the machine put in the coins try plunging and be like well it ate my quarters and then walk away Com finalmente version in contact function John Papadiuk, Black Water, person's name or role at Stern Pinball), or Is that taking most of your attention and artistic focus these days? It is taking a vast amount of it. At the time of this recording, I'm currently coloring the book pretty feverishly and I'm like three-fourths of the way done. And so that will be coming out probably early next year. Um, and then I'm also working on these two books that are in the same vein of the science comics. It's kind of taking, you know, like education and comics and putting them together. Uh, but it's about basic mathematics. There's a book about multiplication, Division, and then a book about Fractions and Decimals. Um, but it's all about like superheroes, you know, fighting an evil supervillain, you know, saving the world and stuff. It's just like very John Chatty. I'm working on those three books this year and that's pretty much got my attention for the foreseeable future. That's amazing and I'll be looking forward to it. Absolutely. So definitely keep checking back at johnshad.com for not just ordering Pinball, A Graphic History of the Silver Ball, The following is a presentation of the But also John's forthcoming books. And you produce quite a lot of books for somebody who has such detailed illustrations. I'm so amazed every time I look through some of your finished artwork here. It's just gorgeous, John. Fantastic job. Oh, shucks. Exactly. Now is time for the hard-hitting questions. Oh, okay. I'm ready. Have you ever played a bingo pinball? I was chased out of a bar in Brussels because I didn't put money fast enough into a bingo machine. There was a brand new bingo machine in this bar in Brussels. I saw it from the street. I went in with my girlfriend, now wife, and I was standing in front of it. I was like, oh my God, a modern bingo game. I've never even played an old bingo game. And I get out my euro to put it in the machine and the bartender comes up and starts yelling at me. Now, I guess I just assumed that she didn't want me to just be like gawking, but she also could have been like, I don't know. You're a weirdo. Get out of here. We don't watch sports. I don't know, but I was like, oh, je suis désolé, je suis désolé, and I got out of there. A near brush. Other than that, I played one at, what was the old, the Pinburg. I remember there being one there that I played. Um, yeah, the, the, when it was Replay FX, I remember playing a Bingo! Game. Um, but that is one that I, uh, I know has an entirely huge, vast history. Uh, I'm, I'm a big fan you could say. Um, Sounds like you've created anything. That's true. Um, but, uh, it's, it's so interesting to We look at the dual trajectory pinball had as well. So gambling device, amusement device and where they started to diverge and where they joined back up. You know, I find that bit of history as well as, you know, kind of the underbelly of the hobby with regards to gambling very fascinating. It's obviously something that you can do with any kind of amusement device. Having a structured gambling game that relies upon player skill in the way that pinball does is so unusual. If you think of a slot machine, the skill is in knowing the internals of the machine, The name of the game is the game that you're not privy to as a player. It's all logic. It's really vast- I've never thought about that. In fact I make a reference to a slot machine having just a binary input. And, and, you know, but it's true that if one did have knowledge then the skill would be, okay, well this one versus this one versus this one, but that skill can't exist because you're not privy to the insight. That's really, that's really interesting. Yeah. That's part of the appeal of the other appeal of course is that they're like giant computers. And they're really fun to fix. They are extremely fun to fix. When you don't have to learn coding. But so aside from... Could I ask a follow up question? Absolutely. I'm really fascinated by, you know, like pinball itself, you know, the history can at times seem very linear, but you know, I think that pinball itself is a branch off of a tree. You know, I don't think that pinball is the trunk. I think that pinball is a branch off of lawn games, you know, and you know, from the from the bagatelle games from the courts of Louis the 14th, you also get pool and snooker and bumper pool and stuff like that. And so when when that The branch of pinball branches off of lawn games. When does it branch off into bingo? Is it post-flipper? I assume it's pre-flipper. It's, uh, so bingo itself was an offshoot of a different style of game, which has its roots back in the 30s. But bingos started in 1951. They were a reaction to... Are you talking about like bingo, like bingo hall bingo, like not a machine but like... Oh sorry, I mean bingo pinball. Oh okay, looks like... is bingo from the 50s? Bingo, 1951. No no, bingo existed for some period of time long before that, but I don't know how long exactly. We're not slow in the game. In the actual, yeah, bingo game.
    62:03
    But yeah, very, that's a curious idea, because I'm sure that many of those styles of games do have common roots in, you know, amusement and bingo, the game with What is this? Not a pinball, but a pinball. No. So, if you have a pinball, and you're trying to start with the pinball, and you're trying to start with the pinball, you're trying to start with the pinball, so this is a pinball that you can do with ping pong balls, with letters and numbers, is one such that can entertain multiple people at the same time, where as bingo pinballs or gambling pinballs, it's a single person opportunity there. So, yeah, it'd be really interesting to figure out... I can see the gears clicking in the air. Very slowly, but they are moving. Like, in pinball, the game?
    63:02
    Yeah, you know, the amusement versus the gambling factor for different parlor games and how that diversion happened. I'd be really fascinated if we were to learn that, like... I'm a pinball expert, I'm an expert on this. It looks like it's from the 1500s from Italy. It derives from a game that was then... I know! But at the same time, I'm not surprised. And also it says that, you know, I'd have to do more research on this. I'm not an expert. I am just kidding. But it says that it went from Italy to France and it was a game called Illotto, which is like what I think of when I think of bingo. It's just basically a truncated rapid fire megabucks drawing. You know, you're just like megabucks drawing until somebody wins. And it's funny that it's It's so similar to gambling but yet I think is just treated culturally a lot different than gambling. I'm sure that, you know, and I would love to, to learn more about what struggles bingo pinballs had to go through. Or bingo machines. Is it unfair to call them bingo pinballs? I like to call them bingo pinballs and the reason being that they are pinball. You know, if you, they have a spring-loaded plunger, they have pins on the playfield, they have balls, you have physical control of the machine, you're shaking it around, you're nudging it, you're pulling it away from specific holes, you're trying to get physical elements of the playfield to interact in a specific way so that you win. Tantrum- Not intentionally marginalize, that sounds really stupid, but you know push them into a different category, yeah exactly, than flipper games or amusement games. Sure. So that's my book box about Bingo Pinball. This tangent about, you know, when I mistakenly thought that you were saying that Bingo the Game came out in 1951. You were instead referring to Bingo Pinball, which came out in the early 50s, you said? 1951. And yeah, that was a reaction to federal crackdown on one-ball machines. So those are the ones where they're similar to bingo pinballs where you're building up a big game with one or more coins, but then you only have one ball and one shot to win. Yeah, Turf King. Oh, yeah. I picked up! It is an example of that. But yeah, those go back to the 1930s. Yeah, I actually think I have Turf King in the book. It's like a racing game, right? It's a horse racing game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was actually hard to find those payout machines. You know, I think it was this, you know, it really illustrates kind of the fallacy that people were operating under that, you know, like the market was saturated by these. These gambling payout machines when really I just don't know if they were as numerous as people thought them to be.
    67:10
    They made a lot, but they were very expensive compared to amusement devices because they earned so much more. They were able to charge more and the mechanisms inside were more robust. And you know, there's all kinds of things I could take you down. The four words Knepp дверцать сецов, ä каждый год Эксперт 1988 Äikte сец, Ä graphicПъб из пъй நhope auss regain,ä trade down àthěs c racist ongoing achter ,iacarè kéė 3,5emanιά Kèng κάctra с UWけれ σοья watchtě But, yeah, so at some point, John, I hope that you get to hang out and I I'll get to bore you to tears in person. I would love nothing more. Horse racing games. Because I would love also, I'm really salivating at the chance to someday see your multivingo machine. I'm a big fan of that game. I wonder why. But I've also made another multigame that's only one-ball horse race games. Gallão Monica隊 the
    68:33
    gand drive σι The following two have kind of a history of gambling Pinball from 1936 to 1981 in the United States. Wow! So, yeah, like I say, you can be bored to tears for as long as you like. Like my entire life. Or, be sucked in and, you know, just keep putting in nickel after nickel, which is what happened to me. Drain my nickel collection, yeah. Cite personal I have nickels. Yeah. Wow! Oh, that's cool. So, um, but yeah, and obviously I have a lot of amusement work as well. I've been doing these P3 games and I have, I'm about to release a fourth one. Surprise surprise. In the works on a fifth as well. So, at some point I will, not that soon. At some point we'll have to... I always feel left out, man. Yeah, I would love to hear what the process of that is like and what the steps are. And especially, you know, I would be interested from an art perspective, like what is the integration of art and how does that process, when you're working on the game by yourself, how does that process mirror one another? But we can, let's sidebar about that. Sounds good. John, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us tonight and it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. And again, I want to encourage all my listeners and especially those who have had an interest in works like Coin Op Carnival to pick up one or multiple copies of John Chad's Pinball, a Graphic History of the Silver Ball. And again, the best place to find John Chad and all of his works The link to the pre-order is at johnshad.com and I'll be linking that as well as the pre-order from the bookstore in the show notes. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun to talk about. This was really great to... Thank you for coming! Oh, it was so great to meet you, Ava! You too! We'll have a... Gotta change the cover. Yeah, we'll have another drawing sidebar at some point. Sure. Thank you very much for listening. My name again is Nick Baldridge and Ava Baldridge and our guest John Chad. You can reach me at 4amusementonlypodcast at gmail.com or the Bingo tip line which is 724-BINGOS1. That's 724-246-4671. You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Google Play Music, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter. You can follow me at bingopodcasts.com. The show's website is www.foramusementonly.libsyn.com. And thank you very much for listening again, and we'll talk to you next time.