it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teels you can find everything on pinballprofile.com all past episodes subscriptions and more we're on twitter x facebook instagram all at pinball profile and if you'd like to be a wonderful patreon supporter boy that would be nice Don't worry, the show will always be free, but your support helps this show continue on. Now, I've said this for years. I think every single person I've ever met is always good at one thing. Our next guest might be good at a few things, and we're going to get into some of those because he seems to do it all. You know him, Ryan Claytor. Hi, Ryan. Hey, it's Jeff. Thank you for the very kind introduction. I hope I didn't ruin it with my laugh, but thanks for your kind words. I'm sure you're modest, but really, I mean, And we're going to get into why you're on this program, how busy a month this is, what you've been cooking. But the last time you and I were talking was obviously back in the days when Coin-Op Carnival, the fine book you and Nick Baldrige put together. And that's a few years ago and a few books ago for you. Yeah, it's been five years since Coin-Op Carnival came out. And actually, funny enough, that's sort of an oddly, an impetus for the creation of this new book that we're talking about here. Coin-Op Carnival came out in 2019, and Nick and I toured the country for that book as best as two working dads can. And we were real busy in 2019. And at the end of 2019, I realized, oh, my God, this was my 15-year anniversary of making comics. And I did not even say anything about it because I totally forgot about it because of Coin-Op Carnival. So at that time, I told myself, all right, when it's my 20-year anniversary of making comics, I'm going to do something big and started conceptualizing this next book. I would say something big. The book is called One Bite at a Time, the First 20 Years of Elephant Eater Comics, and it is right now part of a Kickstarter campaign. So we'll get into the details of that. But let's talk about the book. I mean, it's got a lot of different things in there, a lot of different elements. You think it's just comics, but no, it's way more than that. Yeah, it's true. And I am fully aware that I am on a pinball podcast, so I should probably tackle the elephant in the room first before I start talking about this book, which is the P word. Yes, Kickstarter is a preorder model, and I am asking for some help before I make this book. So I want to tackle that first because I've got a 100% track record of working on Kickstarter. Nick and I did not kickstart Coin Op Carnival very deliberately because we knew, hey, we're talking to a pinball audience. Pre-order is kind of a four-letter word in the pinball industry with all the history that you and I have experienced over the past, you know, five, ten years. But with that said, it's not a four-letter word. in the comics industry. And so because my work has to do with comics, I'm hopping back on Kickstarter because this book is so big and ambitious. I'm also coming to Kickstarter for some help, but it also has a lot to do with pinball. As a matter of fact, the 250 pages in this book, I'd say about 25% of them are directly related to pinball. I've done a lot of illustrations for pinball events throughout the years, pinball podcasts. I've done Coin Op Carnival. There's artwork from that. I've also done some custom watches for London-based company Mr. Jones Watches, both of which have some pinball and arcade ties to them if you haven't seen them. And so there's a lot of pinball content in this book. But with that elephant out of the room, letting everybody know that I have a 100% track record of fulfilling my Kickstarter project, Let's talk about this book. Let's talk about it. I heard you laugh at the start when I said you're good at several things. You just named a few of them now. We're going to see this in the book here because the comic element of it, for those that don't know, one of the other things you're great at is you're a university professor at Michigan State. Go Spartans. And you actually now, teaching has changed over the 20 years. You are now specifically teaching comic classes. That's right. I teach exclusively comics classes at Michigan State University. It did not always used to be that way, but I've sort of grown a program along with a number of other professors on campus to the point where my classes are now all over enrolling right now. We've got a really great problem to have. But we also have a ton of great comics resources at Michigan State University, even culminating in the largest public collection of comic books in the world. sits in our main library. So it's hard to get much better than that. But this all sort of comes back to this book that I was mentioning, because I sort of view this book as like a bit of an extension of Ryan Claytor, the educator, and I'll try to explain why I see that. So this book, One Bite at a Time, this big, oversized hardcover art book, is featuring 20 years of my work in comics, illustration and design. And it has a heavy emphasis on behind the scenes process images. So it's not just pretty picture after pretty picture. I've picked up art books like that. And honestly, when I get finished with them, even if the art is real good, I'm left feeling a little bit empty at the end because I have so many questions like, what was this piece for? When was it produced? Who was it produced for? And I'm trying to rectify that a little bit with my book yet not dive into the mountains and mountains of text art book that's like an academic prose book. It sits somewhere in between where there's a lot of illustrations leading up to the final piece. So you'll get to see stuff like my beginning sketches leading to final pencils and then the finished inks and then flats and colors and then the final project itself And all of that is accompanied with a little bit of contextual information like maybe a paragraph or so talking about how the piece came about why it happened, and when it happened. So all this to say, this process stuff that I'm talking about is kind of an education, if you will, and I hope it's a fun education, either if you're an artist or even if you're not, getting to figure out, oh, okay, these images don't just happen. Here's the process that it took to make them happen. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because obviously art is very subjective, but when you see art, that is the end result, how you got there. And when you find out how you got there, the process that you talk about, it makes you appreciate the art even that much better, whether it's comics, whether it's any kind of artwork or music, any kind of art form, The process is spectacular, and as someone who is not very artistic, I'm fascinated by finding out how people come about this, and we're going to get that in One Byte at a Time. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, even in the Kickstarter campaign, if people go there to take a look, and you can see that at onebyteatatimebook.com. That's onebyteatatimebook.com. That'll take you straight to the Kickstarter page. You'll see that I feel the exact same way you do. I love process, whether it has to do with art or pinball machines or anything. I love seeing how people do what they do, even as far back as when I was a kid watching Mr. Rogers and seeing, you know, the factory tours. That was endlessly fascinating to me and it still is to this day. And in this book, not only are you getting those page spreads showing the process on the left-hand side of the page and then the final image on the right-hand side of the page, but this book has a ton of different specialty formatting associated with it that also buttresses this theme of process throughout the book. It's got stuff like vellum overlays, gatefold pages, die cut reveals. And I know that's a bunch of print nerd talk that nobody knows what it means, but I'll try to demystify that here. Basically, let's take one of those things like die cuts. Basically, a page can have specific holes cut into it. And there's one particular page that I'm thinking of right now. And if you go to the Kickstarter page, you'll see this illustrated. Is this the Wayne Nyans one? That's right. So in Coin-Op Carnival, I illustrated this introductory image of Wayne Nyans sitting on this like pyramid of pinball machines that he made. And I wanted to think about, you know, what would it look like if Wayne could sit atop all these games that he'd made over the course of his lifetime? I mean, he's the world's most prolific pinball designer. And so I wanted to really emphasize that and illustrate it. so I have this page of original artwork that I have a high-resolution scan of so that you can see in the book when it's reprinted not just the inks, but even the pencils that I used beforehand before I inked it so I could see where I needed to lay down some ink, and even the texture of the page is getting picked up here. It's a really high-resolution scan, but that's not the finished image. The finished image in Coin-Op Carnival was scanned and processed and colored and then finally printed. So that image is printed on the page after the Wayne Nyhan's original artwork. But I have some die cut holes in the original artwork page so that you can see through to the page behind it that has that colored, scanned, fully processed image. And you can kind of get this interactive before and after as you turn the page or see a before and after all through the same page because of those die-cut holes and having it line up with the artwork right behind it. I hope that explanation clarifies things a little bit. Yeah, that's just one aspect of this book. And again, real attention to detail. Again, the process that we talked about. The watches, you briefly mentioned that. That has become an industry I had no idea how big it was. I hear our good friend Dennis Creasel talk a lot about it on Eclectic Gamers. and, of course, the pinball show, and he's fascinated by it. So we're going to get more into pinball. I'm just kind of curious how the watch thing came about. Yeah, our good buddy Dennis Creasel has even his own YouTube channel called Watches with Dennis, and just go over there and check out his viewership at some point. Like the number of views his videos are getting are bonkers, and that should tell you a little bit about how many people are interested in horology or the study of watches. and I first started getting into this around the early pandemic days. I think we were all trying to deal with this global pandemic as best we could and one of the ways I did that was to become interested in a new hobby and it seems like kind of an offshoot, like not very related to pinball, but if you think about it, it is kind of related to pinball in the sense that there's artwork, there's design, there's mechanics. Sometimes there's electronics, not always. There's sort of a EM versus solid state in the fact that you can have mechanical and automatic watches that have no batteries in them whatsoever. Yep. There's also action buttons. Right. Totally. And then you can also have battery operated watches, which they call quartz watches. Anyway, a lot to get into there. But I started looking around at a bunch of different watch manufacturers and found this particular manufacturer in London, Robert Englunds called Mr. Jones Watches. And they were making these really interesting artist designed watches. And the more I looked at them, the more I started pining after them. I got a couple of my own and eventually I said, that's it. I got to contact this place. And I wrote them a message and said, hello, my name is Ryan Claytor, introduced myself, sent them to a page with some of my artwork. and to my surprise, they wrote back in a day or so saying, love your work, would love to work with you, let's talk, and the rest is history. We've got a couple watches that I've produced with them now, one of which is in their permanent collection and has been sold out and reissued I can even count how many times now It just been a really surreal experience but so fun to see it sort of come to fruition like this So you'll see this in One Byte at a Time. Go to onebyteatatimebook.com to find out all the Kickstarter information and everything about this huge 250-page book, watches, comics, and yes, again, pinball. So you've seen over the time you've put out Coin Op Carnival, a lot has changed in pinball. A lot has changed in pinball art. And I'm sure that's something you pay close attention to. I'm kind of curious your thoughts of pinball art. Here we are in 2023. Yeah, yeah. So I'm actually extraordinarily pleased with how pinball art has come back to hand-drawn artwork in a big way over the course of the past five years. You know, I remember when Metallica came out and people's minds were exploding that Stern allowed Donny Gillies (Dirty Donny) to put ink to paper and figure out how to draw on a pinball machine again. It was fantastic. And since then, I mean, you know, as well as I do, we've got all sorts of different artists working from Johnny Crap to Zombie Yeti. And I can't get enough of Zombie Yeti's artwork. He is just probably one of the best pinball artists of all time. I mean, rivaling folks like Paul Faris. You know, Paul Faris did one of my favorite art packages in pinball of all time, which is Phantom of the Opera. I love his work on that game. I also really adore the work of an uncredited artist from Bali in the 1960s. He did works like Hayride and Sheba, which are perfection in my humble opinion. I love those art packages. but I'm so happy that we're finally starting to come back to that like key line artwork with more flat. I hesitate to say that because we've got a lot of gradients going on in the modern era, which we can do now that we're a little tough to do with screen printing, but printing has come a long way too since then. So all that to say, yes, I'm a big fan of where pinball artwork is at right now. And thank you, Zombie Yeti, for making me feel so happy about it. You've also got there in Michigan, your state, you've got Christopher Franchi who does wonderful things too. And it's funny you talk about the art of different styles. I remember talking to a young girl in Germany, her name is Amy Ziegenhagen, and she was on Pinball Profile back before the summer, and she wants to get into art. And I was asking her some of her favorite art packages, and she said one I'd never heard anyone say. And I looked at it, and I'm like, okay, yeah, I can see it. You think of all the ones you just mentioned. she's in love with Mata Hari. Oh, yes. Dave Christensen. Yep. And Dave certainly has done, I think he did Captain Fantastic. And yes, we know about the questionable things in there and some of the other things and Dave's interests, obviously, but some good artwork for sure from the past. And like you say, here in 2023, we're seeing kind of no more of this Photoshop or cut and paste or just some of the weaker art packages that we saw in the past. We don't see that anymore. Yeah. it's a good time to to be liking pinball for sure so how long did it take you to put together this book because it is a big one one bite at a time i know you kind of got into the watches like you say in the pandemic time so that's relatively new you've been doing comics and and this for 20 plus years teaching at michigan state but this isn't even your second book you've got several, don't you? Yeah, I'm way up in the teens there. This is like 17, 18, 19th book. I'd have to stop and count, to be honest with you. But yeah, I've made a few books. But this one in particular is the most ambitious print design project I have ever undertaken. There's so many bells and whistles on this thing. If you take a look at just the cover, it's a dual cloth-bound cover. So it's not bound with paper. It's bound with actual cloth, that teal and brown that you see on there. And on top of there, the title is foil stamped in two colors, that copper and teal. But you'll have foil stamping on both the cover, spine, and even the back cover too, as well as built-in ribbon bookmarks, copper foil, page edges, just a ton of stuff thrown at this book. And that's not even mentioning the interior specialty items that I mentioned before. So there's a lot going on in this book. I think I mentioned to you just before we started recording, I had a conversation with my printer just this week where we went over every single page and every bit of specialty formatting, every nook and cranny of this book. We were on Zoom for over an hour talking about this just to make sure that everything is happening according to how I'm designing it, seeing if there's going to be any challenges or anything. And I got to say, that meeting went extraordinarily well. I am so happy with how this project is moving forward. Well, you can hear the pride in your voice for sure. It's a long time coming. I don't know how you do it. I mean, there's teaching, there's the watches, the comics, there's just these several books. Ryan, once and for all, admit, are you a vampire? Do you sleep? Well, my good buddy Nicholas Baldridge put out a game recently called Drained. And I haven't told anybody this yet, but I'll give you an exclusive scoop that was based on me, the vampire. No, I'm just kidding. But sincerely, props out to Nicholas Baldridge, my best bud. Go to DrainPinball.com. Got to get that plug in there for him. But no, I'm just really trying to follow my passions at this point. You know, we've only got so much time on this earth. And, you know, if you're into pinball and comics and watches and neon, why not do it all? Were there ever moments where you were discouraged, maybe some roadblocks or finances or whatever the case may be? I mean, what pushed you through to make this book come to fruition? Oh, of course. Yeah, I mean, I know that as a white cis male, I have a lot of privilege in this world. but with that said, there's definitely some points in this book that were some hangups for me. For example, I'm including things that were rejected designs There are designs that I thought hey this is gonna work out and whoever I was working with did not feel the same way And you get to see some of those So this book in addition to being a 20 overview of my work is also sort of a narrative of a career being formed and in the process of being formed You know, I feel like I'm sort of a mid-career cartoonist at this point. And so I'm also really excited for things that are still to come. but I think it serves as kind of a nice overarching narrative of where I started from. There's pieces in here from when I was going through university and grad school, and even before that when I didn't know what the heck I was going to do. I never suspected that I would be a university professor of comics. That didn't even register on my radar at the time. But over the course of these 20 years that you're going to see in this book, You'll see a lot of different pieces come to fruition, a lot of learning on my part, and a lot of development in terms of occupation and also, I think, maybe my own character, hopefully. Okay, you're a self-proclaimed expert. I am? In comics. Yes? Who said that? Well, if you're going to be on this podcast and several other podcasts promoting this wonderful book of yours, you need to answer this question. And if you get it wrong, that's fine. Just have it in the back of your brain there to be able to answer it in the future. Let's see. The comic book guy on The Simpsons. What's his real name? Oh, my gosh. You're putting me on the spot. I don't know. Yep. No Googling. No typing. You didn't give me enough time to Google. Yeah. Too bad. I'm counting that as you don't know. The reason I know it is his name, which is never mentioned, is actually Jeff. Is it Jeff? Oh, my gosh. It's Jeff. Jeff Albertson. So now you've got it. What a trip. I will never forget that anymore. Please don't air that. You can win a beer at a pub some night, at a quiz night or something like that. But there you go, Jeff Albertson. That's awesome. The reason I bring up The Simpsons is here you are teaching this comics class, and that just fascinates me. I'm geeking out here for a second. and I know it's a pinball podcast, but why I like this and why I'm excited for One Bite at a Time and the 20 years of Elephant Eaters Comics is because you're teaching a comics class. And when you and I were younger, we remember as kids there was one Disney movie a year. And then Toy Story came along and said, look what you can do with computers and animations. Oh, okay. And then they started to be a few more. And then even the Oscars adds a best animated feature because there are so many that come out. They come out all the time now. And then same for television. Simpsons was pretty big. But before that, it was like a primetime cartoon was the Flintstones. And then the Simpsons came on. And, oh, okay. Then we get King of the Hill and Family Guy, American Dad, Bob's Burgers. They're everywhere. Well, that is probably, in big part, why you get to teach a class on comics. Because the books themselves, how many movies have been made from comic adaptations? And whether it's the graphic novels, the Frank Millers, whatever it is, there's just so much animation now that there is a need and somebody has to learn it. So you go to Michigan State, you learn from Ryan. Yeah, it's true. And as much work as comics are, animated films are so much more. And there's teams involved and just a ton of work. But at the bottom line, you need to have a story. You need to have an interesting narrative and characters. And if that doesn't happen, then it's going to fall flat. And so comics are a great place to be able to craft those stories and make those personal narratives where potentially one person could craft an entire comic book, an entire graphic novel and have and do. And they're often what are looked at as, OK, this is the beginning stage of what we're going to turn into a movie or the next MCU franchise operation. So, yeah, they're a fantastic place, a fantastic medium for storytelling, and I will sing that until my dying day. Well, I wish you all the best success. Again, go to OneBiteAtATimeBook.com for all the information. The Kickstarter, you'll see what you get. He has 100% approval rating and success when it comes to Kickstarter, so don't worry about that when it comes to Ryan Claytor's new book. And I wish you the best of luck. And same to your good buddy, too, Nick Baldrige. because I'm excited that he's doing big things with Multimorphic now. Oh, my gosh. That was such an exciting piece of news to see that Multimorphic finally got off the bench and said, Hey, Nick, come on over here because he deserves it. He's helping people out just seemingly every waking moment, not only with electromechanical and bingo pinball machines, but also new modern stuff. You know, he repairs games himself. He's so good at it. he can tell you how to do it over an email or a phone call or a Zoom or anything. So I don't think Multimorphic could have made a better hire than Nicholas Baldridge. So congratulations, Multimorphic, and great job, Nick. I always knew you could do it. But thank you so much, Jeff, for having me on here today. I so, so appreciate having a conversation with you and being able to chat with your listeners. That is very, very cool of you to allow me to do. So thank you. Well, I'm sure you're going to do very well. I've got my coin-op carnival book right here in front of me. And so soon it'll be one bite at a time, but you can find out more, again, one bite at a time, book.com. All the best to you. I think you did well. I think comic book guy would have a hard time saying, worst podcast ever. Don't worry. We did well. We did a good job. Other Jeff would approve. Thank you. All the best, Ryan. You too, Jeff. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. We're on Twitter, Instagram. We're on Facebook as well, too. You can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. Let me know who you'd like to hear from, and maybe we'll get them on the program. If you'd like to show your support, you can do that on patreon.com slash pinballprofile. Don't worry. The show will always be free. It just helps keep this show going, and I really appreciate it. This has been your Pinball Profile. I'm Jeff Teolis. All right.