Joseph Italiano

Voice Over (00:02):
This show is sponsored by The Comics Shop. Welcome to Tuesday Chinwag with your host, Lee Chalker, writer, artist, and creator of the Comic series Battle for Basel.

Leigh Chalker (00:25):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Tuesday Chinwag. My name is Lee Chalker and I am the creator of Battle for Bustle. Now, battle for Bustle is available in the Comex Shop. The reason I mentioned the Comex shop is because it sponsors all of the live streams and this show. So there’s over 110 Australian comic book creators in the comic shop. It has a $9 flat rate of postage for one or 20 comics, and you can go and cut sick and get as many as you wish. Now for all of those that haven’t seen, a Tuesday at s Chinwag Show is based on who, what, where, when, how, and why. It’s a fluid show because that’s the way I like it. And we just talk about lots of stuff to do with comic books and life and whatever comes up, comments are encouraged, and comments are welcome.

(01:20)
So if you have any questions for our guests this evening, then please feel free. Hello, Ben. Hello to everyone out there that’s going to be watching the show. It’s Tuesday, Mr. Chana. Yes it is. Yeah. Good day, mate. How are you? And oh, Jeffrey Beats. Good day. All looking forward to this Chinwag, as am I, mate. Oh, Shawnee, how are you? Woohoo. Let’s go. The enthusiasm. Ray Williams. Hey, all. Got my beverage of choice all ready for another great chinwag. Well, my God, absent minded. Hello everyone. Hello, absent Jeffrey. Good day. Ray Williams legend. Okay, Nick May. Hello gents. Man, they’re coming in thick and fast here. Good lord. Danny Nolan. Hello Lee. Finished the book. Joe, finish the book. KJ b Gday, chin wagoners. My God, I’m going to need three litres of water just to cool myself down here. Joe, lucky the show will be about you.

(02:18)
So the best thing that anyone can do for Comex is to like and subscribe and share across the channels. Now, basically, I was having a little look see at YouTube today, and we’re up to about 477 subscribers, so we’re not too far away from 500. So I just thought I’d double check myself because sometimes I can be a drunko and I’d noticed, can you believe this? I couldn’t. I hadn’t subscribed. Ha ha. What an egghead. So the best thing you could do is just have a little double check your paperwork, make sure you subscribe. Maybe get us up to that 500 number because that would be sweet and everyone can jump for joy and the community will grow and it’ll stretch out to more and more people and that’s the best thing we want for Comex. So we can bring you guests like the next man this evening. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to try and be quiet for as long as I can to recover from that sudden burst of energy. And tonight’s guest is Mr. Joseph Ano. How are you sir?

Joseph Italiano (03:23):
I’m good. Doing well.

Leigh Chalker (03:25):
I’m glad to hear, man. Thank you very much for coming on the show and thank you for becoming part of the Chinwag family. Very excited and very grateful for your time here tonight, mate. So I’m just going to look man, I’m going to get into it, right? I’m going to get into it with the first big question. Joe, are you ready?

Joseph Italiano (03:46):
I’m ready. Alright. Shoot.

Leigh Chalker (03:48):
I will Who?

Joseph Italiano (03:52):
Okay, so I will start with the very early who obviously I’m here because I have some involvement with comics. Most people think of me as just someone that runs a shop, but we’ve done a lot more than that. My comic career started when I was about 12. A lot of kids, I watched TV and I was a massive fan of Thunderbirds. I’m sure you’ve all heard of it. And I was a budding artist then as well. And I used to draw Thunderbirds at school because what else would do at school? You don’t learn anything. Oh man. And one of my fellow students who we called the professor because he used to read a lot, he came up to me and said, you’re drawing them wrong. I’m going, what are you talking about? They’re all wrong. They don’t look like that. Yes they do. He goes, no, they don’t because I’ve been reading the comics and they draw me exactly the right. They’re like that. I went comics, what the hell’s that? And through that I discovered the British weeklies called TV 21 and Countdown, which were standard British weeklys except they had a lot of the British TV shows adapted in comic book form. And that’s probably the first time I started reading regularly.

(05:06)
And the interesting thing about that is that’s how I got my introduction into US comics. A lot of people don’t know, but TV 21 started featuring Spiderman comics around about the issues in the eighties. And oddly enough, I kind of liked it. Probably the only one that ever did. I don’t think we ever catch on Spiderman.

Leigh Chalker (05:29):
Oh man, can’t believe it

Joseph Italiano (05:31):
Either. I know you probably haven’t heard of him. And that’s what got me into things now. It was a lot more influenced than just reading comics. I always, as I said, had a bit of an artistic desire, but that put me through the roof and from there I just wanted to be an artist. And that’s why I got into graphic design. I started doing art at the higher levels at high school when I was in year, say year 11 or form five as they used to call it. I actually dropped art as a subject. Everyone’s going, hang on, that doesn’t make any sense. The reason I dropped art as a subject was because they did history and they did boring history, short version. I thought I hated history, but I actually loved it. They just taught crap.

(06:28)
So instead of doing art, I did graphic design, which that year in HSC or year 12, it was the first year they introduced graphic design as a year 12 subject, which was pretty good because the whole class consisted of three students. The entire art budget was devoted to year 12, so we can get anything we want. We’ve got this new fanangle thing called CET and Zipper Toe. Yeah, we’ll get that. Whatever you wanted we could get. And that led to the next stage which was, Hey, this is pretty cool. I want to keep doing this. So I started seeing applications for tertiary to do graphic design. Now, at the time there was two significant schools. You had RMIT and you had Swinburne Tech. I applied to both. The first interview I went to was Swinburn. Swinburne was one of the weirdest things I’d ever done.

(07:32)
So I went in, they had a three or four hour exam and one of the things was draw, whatever it was, whatever it was, I’m going, this is crazy. What kind of artists come down and say you’ve got to do something and finish it in a couple of hours. That’s your exam. Anyway, I did whatever they had to do and thought that was kind of weird. There was other parts of it, technical questions and stuff. Then I went to the RMIT interview, which was even stranger. So I went in, there was I think five or six lecturers. They sat me down on the couch. They went, oh yeah, okay. They had a very quick look at my folio. Turned up to me and said, they asked me one question, what do you want to know? They went, these guys are pretty laid back back. I can’t remember what I asked, but I thought, yeah, look, that’s it.

(08:30)
I’m in. Subsequent to that, I learned the big difference between the two colleges. So what Swinburn would do is they get a whole bunch of people in and they trained them to draw, paint, sketch, whatever in a particular style. Everyone that came out of Swim Bird was a clone that looked exactly the same. RMIT was complete opposite. It was you do something and they’ll encourage you to do something different. The most significant class, which I thought was a real joke at the time that I did, was one of the subjects, can’t remember the name of it, but it was something to do with experimentation. Alright, yeah, I’ve done a bit of that.

(09:21)
What it was, I dunno if they still do it would’ve me, it was, okay guys, what you supposed to do? I want you to fill a binder about so big of different types of art techniques again, like what? At least a couple of hundred. I’m going, how are you going to do that? And everyone started, all the students started sharing to us like, oh look, I did a bromide and if you let it sit in the sun, it goes yellow. That’s different. You’ll put that in and I spill paint and do this. And what it basically did, it forced you to use all sorts of different mediums and it was actually one of the most useful classes I ever took. Not just for all. I do that for everything. I do all the maintenance, woodwork, building and stuff at the shop as well. And you’d be surprised what supply the junk we use to make stuff. But going back to why the other school was different, when I got into RMIT, I did get accepted to both. I chose RMIT obviously, and I said I was talking to other students why I picked this. I thought, this is a great school. They’re so laid back. They didn’t even ask me any questions. And they went, what? I said, they sit me down and say, what do you want to know? I said, no, no, we all got the Spanish Inquisition. And I’m thinking, what the hell’s going on?

(10:52)
And through some back doors, because we were the first wave of graphic design students that had come out of high school and obviously I think the teacher liked us. We got such a good report that they’d accepted us before we’d even went there. It’s like, well look, it just shows you guys working at school and doing the right thing with your teachers makes a hell of a difference. That was a massive jump. I would’ve hated to have ended up at swinburn. And the big plus was when everyone finally got out, every student was unique. Every art style was completely different. And what I think about it, you think that is so weird because you’re all working together. So that’s where the graphics came from. Then the fun part starts, of course, like everybody else wanted to do comics, but not that easy. While I was still in college, we then ran into, I think it was Morris, I’m not exactly sure where we met. I think it was probably through TAC when that came out. And as soon as I saw a local fancy and I went kind of ape shit and I jumped on board straight away. So I think it was in say 77, the group ran a thing called an art show at St. Kilda in Melbourne, which was a comic related art show at a gallery. It was low key. It was small. By that stage, I was the obviously resident designer and graphic artist for tac.

(12:40)
I think from issue two, I was doing the covers on pretty much all the design work and we produced a magazine to accompany what we were doing because the art show was relatively successful in 78 that launched Comic Con One, which was the first Australian comic convention, not to be confused with the current comic convention, which has the same name and is run by different people. I think they’re on their third set of people now. So what we did, we wanted to run conventions like the us except we had this minor problem. All the American creators were in America. It was a bit expensive to bring ’em out. So we did a slightly different thing. When we organised the conventions, we literally dug up pretty much every creator from current newspaper strips and old artists from comic books that we could find. Morris was very good at digging up information. We had our first convention at RMIT, which sounds a bit odd, but this is, well, that’s another story. We’ll sidetrack to that story as I like to say. Digress while

Leigh Chalker (13:57):
Sidetrack.

Joseph Italiano (13:58):
Sidetrack.

Leigh Chalker (14:05):
Hello Peter. Hello Dave. Hi.

Joseph Italiano (14:09):
So what happened there was I was doing graphic, I think might’ve been my second year. Can’t remember exactly. And one of the things I learned from the Corne brothers who had since dropped out, the whole thing was that tech was actually financed by Melbourne University. So you make, people don’t know that. Like, well, why did they finance it? Well see, they were very sneaky. They were there at the time and they formed a little club and got a club grant. So I went, oh, that’s a really good idea. So I said, I’ll do that. I’ll form a club to get financing and support. Problem is you need 15 students to sign up. I can’t be bothered running around doing this. So I basically just went to pretty much all my fellow students at the course and they all just signed up till we had enough.

(15:04)
We got a club as a club, we get the venue for free. So we got the RMIT union buildings, there’s a venue, and we got support from them to do wonderful things like hire movies. He used to use 16 mil and eight mil. I was a 16 mil projectionist because someone had to learn how to use it. And we did do that for the club as well. We used to do movies for the, because it was Thet, science fiction and comic club. What sort of movies did you show? Mostly Fantasy sci-Fi band, feller Worth, Jason and the Aror, that sort of stuff. This is well before DVDs 16 mil was way, yeah, that be cool. And we use that to get movies for the convention as well. We got the venue for free, we invited a lot of us. The exact number escaped me. I know John Dixon was there and pretty much anyone that was anyone was there that was still alive.

(16:03)
It’s all going to be in the book anyway. And we actually had a convention with all the local creators. The only memory I have of significance was that I was so excited I was going to finally meet all these Australian creators. I could finally get all my questions answered and know all the history and everything. And the universal response from everybody was, I don’t remember. There was very little information that would’ve been came out of, it was very deflating, didn’t stop, I didn’t prod. I did get some information of significance, but the standard questions which that related to was what did you do? How many comic books did you do? What did you write and draw? And it was, I don’t remember. I understand now why, again, more information. But the short version is most of the comic books change title every month and they were keep track of what was going on and they didn’t want to keep track because it was bad for them if they did.

(17:10)
So they really didn’t know. I think there was only one person that really knew what he was doing. We also got to meet all the newspaper strips artists. That’s how I ended up getting mixed up with Alan Salisbury and I ended up doing some freelance work for him and working on snake and stuff. But yeah, it was a bit of an eyeopener through that. We also made contact with Keith Cheto and after we got up, well, I’m jumping again after we divested ourselves of Tack because we thought, this is terrible. It’s too much work. And about a year later we went, oh shit, we missed a magazine. We want to do another one. So we did a thing called Baby Ack, well, sorry, nickname Baggy Tack. It took me about a year to remember what the actual name was. I think the actual name was the Australian Buyers guy. I’m not joking a year to remember the name.

Leigh Chalker (18:04):
You seem to have caught what those other fellas caught, mate.

Joseph Italiano (18:08):
Yeah, that’s the next part, right? Jumping forward. I’m writing a book about all this history and stuff, and as you said, I’ve got the same problem. I was there, I saw it and I’m having trouble. Remember now I feel sympathy for it. So the most significant thing about baby tech, it was just a new scene about upcoming comics and we started reprinting El Lobo from Keith Chat with permission of course. So I think that’s one of the first delivery prints of an Australian comic book from that period. Anyway, going back, how far back am I going? Oh yeah, we still had the conventions. Anyway, so we ended up running two conventions, comic one and copy two. Good. I’ve only gotten to the, I haven’t even got a 1980 yet, shit, there’s another 40 years to go. Okay.

Leigh Chalker (19:05):
Lucky.

Joseph Italiano (19:05):
So ComicCon two ran along the same formula except we hired a much bigger flashing venue. I believe it was the Sheridan Hotel in the city I think, but I might be getting mixed up with the fantastic, I’m not sure. But it was a hotel venue and that was really good. Went really well. But it was getting a little on the, what you would call repetitive. We ran out of stuff we could do. So we decided to change things up a bit. So what we did in 1980, because by this time we’d been, how would you say, overwhelmed with so much comment material that we diversion a bit with our hobbies. So at this point in time, I had been a role playing gamer and I’d gotten into that side of things a lot more. So what happened was left of the group, as time went on, everyone involved started dropping off. By the time we got to 1980, Morris and I were the only original members left, and we ran an event called Fantastic On. Now what F Teston was, was a multimedia event. It was spent to be science fiction comics and gaming. It was the first major role playing game event. It was three months after CanCon CanCon had a role playing event. But K Con’s a board game event. And there’s a part of irrelevant side note.

(20:34)
We went up with a team, myself and a bunch of others, and we were the first cosplay at a role playing convention. So cosplay,

Leigh Chalker (20:42):
What did you go as man? Well,

Joseph Italiano (20:44):
That’s the thing you see, we didn’t go as anything. What happened was we got there, we got given our d and d characters for the tournament and went, you know what? We should buy some stuff and get dressed up as them. So we spent a day scoring all these secondhand clothes shops and stuff and picked up gear to basically make up our costumes of the characters we were playing. I think I’ve still got the weird fur leather skirt or something and all sorts of weird stuff and

Leigh Chalker (21:15):
Wear that man a barbarian from 1980.

Joseph Italiano (21:28):
So as you can see, we’re in the role playing.

Leigh Chalker (21:31):
That’s cool,

Joseph Italiano (21:32):
Man. We ran fan teston for about six years. It slowly devolved or evolved into just the gaming conventions. We were averaging like 450 to 500 role players just for the DD tournament alone. It was pretty significant at the time. And the weird thing about that is, I won’t go into too much detail, but between that period of 80 to 88, 89, I was probably more involved with role playing and had a similar effect on the role playing industry that I did on the comic industry, which I haven’t got to yet. Anyway. A lot of the people that came ended up through us writing for American companies and doing their own games the like as well. So while all this is going on, I was still in the comics obviously, and I was extremely frustrated because I wanted to play superheroes and the only superhero role playing games that were around at the time were politely speaking complete garbage. One of them, to give you an example of how bad it was was they had rules and stuff, which sounds fine. And I’m going, yeah, yeah, but what about the superpowers? You get to the book and you go through it and you get the superpowers and it says, oh, and you make up whatever powers you want. I thought, what the hell is that? That was the rule.

Leigh Chalker (23:06):
What superhero would you have gone for at the time, man? What was, well,

Joseph Italiano (23:12):
Originally it was let’s play someone that exists, but once we started to get into it, you didn’t want to play cliche characters. You wanted to be your own thing. So what happened was I started writing a roleplay superhero roleplay game in the early eighties, published it in 83. It was the first Australian roleplaying game published called Super Squadron. We launched it at one of the cons and it got a really good reception. It did really well. Got a little pr, everyone was wrapped. I wrote it in slightly different way to most games in that we included a thing called an adventure booklet, which had adventures in it so you could play stuff, but we did it as a narrative story. So all the adventures without necessarily seeming too connected and they had a theme. So it was like, I suppose being in a comic book and going through a mega arc of a storyline.

(24:08)
I know it actually did regionally well because ksm, who was publishing I think called different Worlds magazine at the time, wanted to reprint and explained what we had done with our adventure system and how we’d done it. At the time, I was pretty naive and said, no, that was pretty dumb. Avalon Hill was a big publisher at the time as well. They were huge in board games. They eventually bought Ru Quest, a few other things. I got a call from them, from the owner of that and said, we want to licence it, we want to take Super Squadron. And I went, nah, I’ve got too metre to sell. Should have done it. But another story, but the backhanded compliment is they obviously liked it or they wouldn’t be offering, it’s not to suck up to me.

(24:57)
And that was going pretty well. We got American distribution, everything was going great and fine. And then literally out of the blue, all orders dried up. No distributor would order anything. No one was talking to me. We had absolutely no idea what was going on. And this was like, I think 85, 86 ish and we were very confused. It’s like people like it, people want it, what’s going on? We had been going to GenCon, which is the comic San Diego copper equivalent for gaming. And we got there and the first year, I think it was 80, no, the second year we got there, things were okay. Things was chugging along nicely and we didn’t know what was going on as I said. So we started asking distributors, why have you stopped ordering? And what came back was a total shock. It’s like, oh, we don’t want to be sued for carrying your product for beat of copyright.

(26:05)
And I’m going, what are you talking about? We know you stole stuff for being sued. No, I’m not. I know what you’re on about. And what had happened is there was another mob, I won’t name them, who had a role playing game that was pretty average and they had spread rumours that we were being sued for breach of copyright and they would sue any distributor that carried the product. Now at that time, there was a lot more games coming out. When ours came out, it was still pretty early days in the industry and obviously they couldn’t be bothered doing it. They didn’t bother to do any research or look at it and about the closest thing you could say about our games being the same was like saying, oh look, you ripped off DD because you got magic spells in your game. It’s like, well, you can’t have a fantasy game without spells. You can’t have a superhero game without superpowers and it doesn’t matter how you put them in the book, they’re going to be similar because there’s no way to reinterpret them. If you can shapeshift well, you can shapeshift, right? If you’ve got laser beam eyes, well you do laser beams. So that was about it. So that put a bit of a kick in the teeth and slow. They

Leigh Chalker (27:24):
Played dirty on you joke this other crew,

Joseph Italiano (27:28):
This is very American. I mean, I dunno how much you know about what the Americans do, but they did the same thing with what it Silicon Tech, Silicon Valley, the Michael, blah, blah, blah. It wasn’t Australia was, we met them, we were making them, Silicon Valley bought millions. They were getting orders in Australia from everywhere but couldn’t supply. They were supplying America. They sent all this stuff to America. America got it. They just stuck them in the ocean because they wanted the market and then they took it and by the time the Australians realised the market had gone, I know terrible, isn’t it? It’s a standard tactic in business, which I think is terrible. Anyway, so that kind of put a bit of kibosh on the game. I had done some work in graphics, but unfortunately at the time, graphic design was a trendy thing to do.

(28:20)
So a lot of people had come out and although I did some work, I even did some freelance work for Jeff Kenneth’s agency and stuff, which was pretty cool. People aren’t going to like me, but he was a nice guy, at least to me anyway. But there just wasn’t enough work in it. So I said, okay, this is going to work. Games kind of stuck, can’t do graphics, what can I do? Alright, let’s go back to 77. Again, not that I’m digressing, so as a crazy comic collector, I can never get enough. You probably haven’t met any of those. So I was,

Leigh Chalker (28:55):
No, I’ve gone across a couple, Jay, they’re

Joseph Italiano (28:58):
Pretty rare.

Leigh Chalker (28:59):
I can only count ’em on one hand, man. But

Joseph Italiano (29:02):
Yeah, you must have a lot of hands. So after discovering, obviously the Thunderbirds in here, 21, and then getting into Marvel comics, I got pretty heavily into it by the time I was going through year 12 and such. And unfortunately, if you bought the entire Marvel range of comics at that point in time, you were probably lucky to get 10 books a month, which doesn’t really do much when you need your comic fix. So I was doing anything I can to buy more stuff. So there wasn’t many places to buy books. I think Space Age books was the only one importing comics that had stuff that didn’t have much either. They had new stuff but not old stuff. And I think we used to go through things like the trading posts and stuff like that, which was I suppose the old version of the internet.

(29:54)
I would literally buy anything. I was buying collections hand over fist and it was great. Oh, I bought a collection. I need half of this stuff. I bought a collection. I need 20% of this stuff. I bought a collection. Then by the time I got to there, I was like, oh, I did half a dozen books. This is getting a bit silly. And I started having a huge inventory of multiple copies. So in 1977 I went, okay, I better flog this stuff off. Hang on. If I flug this stuff off, I can get some money and buy more books, which is what I did. So I started images, images in 77, which was a mail order comic business, and we were advertising whatever you could, there was sort of swap meat type things, but not really. Most of it was word of mouth. And so what I started doing was selling stuff, which obviously was raising menu at raising money.

(30:49)
We then had the comic cons and the fantastic cons where we were selling stuff and raising money. Yeah. Then there was the Sydney Convention, which you may be familiar with, which is just, that’s at least a chapter in the book Anyway, so I won’t go into too much detail, but the short version is we rocked up there with a station waggon that I just purchased and had a massive debt on that. My dad signed his guarantor, went up there, sold a bunch of stuff, came back and paid the car off immediately and went, this isn’t too bad. And we continued. We not only started buying the back issues from other people, but I started importing and buying new comics. Now the obvious question is there, while you do that, it’s going to take ages, but I was specific with what I was getting. What was happening is even if we were getting new standard distribution for comics in Australia, there’d usually be anything from three to six month delay.

(31:53)
So you’d always miss the first 2, 3, 4 issues of something and people got very frustrated. So I was buying up those mission gaps and filling in a very important need so people could keep their collections complete. Anyway, so this progressed all through the eighties, progressed through the fantastic era, and we got to 88 just like, okay, so we had to stop doing the cons despite the fact they were extremely popular because we did make a little bit of money, but that usually went on, for example, the last time we did in 1986, I forget which hotel it was, but for staff and whatever, we booked a four bedroom mega suite for everyone. So we had money, but it didn’t seem to last. I don’t know why it didn’t last.

Leigh Chalker (32:43):
Hey, those comics mate, they’ve giving some parties away.

Joseph Italiano (32:47):
It was party time. So pretty much all the money that came through there one way or other ended up back in the system. So it’s like, okay, these are fun and all and it’s taken me six months of work on and off and I’m not actually making a living really. I’m sort of surviving on the back issues, but that’s not real job. So we bit the bullet and said, okay, going to have to do something that I didn’t want to do. And that is we opened a shop. I was very concerned about this because I thought if I open a shop, I’m going to make my hub in my work and it’s going to kill it. And as always, I was sort of right. We opened it in 88 and it became an extension of images. Images. We became the second comic shop in Melbourne at that point in time. Minto had that shop as well, and it did actually kill some of my interest in comics for a while. I continued with role playing and evolved in the card gaming, which is another, I’ll digress there as well. Why I got into card games. You might’ve heard a thing called Magic.

(33:58)
Yeah, yeah, mainly. And then a few others came out. Star Wars. Star Trek came out, motion licence properties. YN came out. It was a bunch of games and we were a store, so we were getting everything. And I got pretty into that and I did a lot of card gaming and the equivalent of miniatures, but not quite. There was a thing called Hero plex, which is plastic miniatures, pre-painted as opposed to lead mini. Got that as well. And I was doing tournaments and stuff and I’ve got a string of championships, Australian and a couple of worlds as well. And that’s where a lot of my energy went for a while.

(34:35)
And there was comics in the background we were selling. I wasn’t really anywhere near as much. And that progressed for some time where we go from there. We eventually got back into comics again in a bigger way away. It was always there in the background. It was always fun. The store grew. We were in 40 Chapel Street originally in 88, then I think we opened a Camberwell store three or four years later. We got an Albury franchise type store sometime after that. We then moved from 40 to 76, which was like four times the size, although we kept 40 for about a year and things were chugging big and going wonderful and everything was terrific. And then I have a problem that apparently some others have experienced. Again, I’m not going to go into too much details. I don’t want to say bad things, but I had a very bad marriage breakup.

(35:40)
All I’ll say is that one thing I have learned in life is if you try your hardest to do everything and you try your best to make amends and it doesn’t work, you don’t have any guilt and you don’t have any regrets. And that is a great feeling. So despite all my efforts to patches up, it wouldn’t work. But that put me out of commission for a while and then that got messy. It went to court, all sorts of horrible stuff happened. And actually no, no, I think there’s a couple of others like that that I can think of. Now, I won’t mention their names because they’re in the industry and they’re still alive now. I’m not the only one, but as it usually happens when things go sour, it’s the comics that suffer and they’re just innocent little babies. What have they done?

Leigh Chalker (36:27):
They just want to be read.

Joseph Italiano (36:28):
Exactly, put it in the bag and bored and stuck a box.

Leigh Chalker (36:33):
Poor little things sitting there, really.

Joseph Italiano (36:37):
So that caused kind of a financial strain. Apparently the only one that wins in these cases are the lawyers. And my ex-wife at the time picked the worst lawyers. Now I don’t mean worst as in they were bad at their job. I mean they were worst because they ripped her off blind. They would generate mountains of unnecessary paperwork, charging a fortune. And it got to the stage. Just one minor point, we get to the court and the judge couldn’t be bothered reading their stack of documentation, this speak. It was like, and my lawyers would start replying to one and we get another one. So we incorporate that and we get another one and we’re just insane.

(37:27)
Anyway, that eventually finished and it made things a bit tight. Then GST came in. That was wonderful. GST was weird because, well, I like to call it the mafia tax. It’s the same thing. We’ll let you continue your business. We’ll protect you from who? From us? Oh, give us 10% or else. Well, that’s DSD. And it turned out that with the downturn in the, sorry, the Camberwell store, which was on Burke Road. Burke Road was like a little chapel street, but that’s started deteriorating quite early. That extra 10% actually made it non-viable to continue the store. So we shut that one down. We kept 76 and reintegrated, the Albury store continued for quite some time. I, I’ve forgotten again, I can’t remember the guy’s name. I should because we were business partners. See, I have this other problem. I only remember things that I can, sorry, my memory only retains information that my subconscious brain thinks is important.

Leigh Chalker (38:46):
Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Italiano (38:48):
Now that might sound weird again, I digress. But apparently, not that I’m saying I am a genius, but apparently it’s a genius trait where if it’s not important, it gets dumped. So your average genius, it just goes in and out. You don’t remember dinner appointments, you don’t remember where you’re supposed to be doing. You remember complicated formulas, but that’s about it. I seem to have that sort of trait. I’m hoping it’s because I’m a genius and just on a side that, but anyway, so my business partner there, he used the business to put himself through drafting school, became a draughtsman, and then he wanted to leave an exit. So sold the shop. The person that wanted to buy it wanted to keep it as the franchise, but politely speaking, we weren’t impressed with him. So we just sold it and left it at that and we were right. He literally ran it into the ground and he got it at a bargain price. He got it at probably, I mean the stock by your loan was probably five, six times what he paid for it, not carrying the business. We went back to one store, which in the scheme of things apparently is a thing to do because pretty much everybody else that’s opened up change has done the same thing. It just gets too hard to manage and too messy and whatever. Have you ever minute or minute or had a Geelong store and they had the same problem. Anyway, so where are we now? I probably in the nineties by now. So yeah,

Leigh Chalker (40:24):
We’re creeping in there. We’re creeping into the nineties, man. You’re into one shop now.

Joseph Italiano (40:30):
We’re into one shop.

Leigh Chalker (40:32):
It’s

Joseph Italiano (40:32):
Pretty big. It’s pretty huge. We’ve got lots of stuff.

Leigh Chalker (40:34):
Business partners and lawyers.

Joseph Italiano (40:37):
Yeah, look, in the meantime, poor, poor old Peter Hughes, who was the second half of the baby tech magazine is sort of raving on his own. I think it might’ve been a bit overwhelming, but he managed to cope to some degree. So things continued okay for a while. So we were recovering from our debt. See, one of the other things is my other problems, I’m a nice guy. So when I split with my wife, it was a very strange split. It was whoever gets the kids should get the house. That’s fair enough. And since I had the bids, I said, look, I’ll let you look after the kids for the moment you take them. By the way, guys, if you’re getting divorce or you’ve got problems, never do that. Right? Never ever do that because you’ve literally just said to the court, I don’t want the kids. Which is not true. And I kept the business because it was full of debts. So she got everything that was non debt related and I got the debts probably not my best decision. But anyway, that’s what happened.

Leigh Chalker (41:58):
Live and learn, mate.

Joseph Italiano (42:02):
I can tell you stories about the family court and I have sympathy for dads that drive their trucks through the front glass. And all I can say is not only is that justified, but that is nothing for what they should be doing. One of the things I found is that the most persecuted and bigoted, what you say, opinions for people, the most tormented person is your white, Caucasian, straight male. You cannot do anything because whatever you do is wrong. I’m going to digress again. Now I see you’ve done it. I’ll give you an example of how bad it is. I won’t go into details, but I’m in court and I’m a little bit unusual in case you had notice in a lot of different ways. For example, I cook,

Leigh Chalker (43:00):
At least tell me you didn’t go to court in a barbarian outfit, man or

Joseph Italiano (43:05):
Shit That might’ve helped.

Leigh Chalker (43:09):
I see why this man’s lucky is with

Joseph Italiano (43:12):
Little and shit. No, but while we were split, I was still getting access. I was getting weekly atlas access because my wife didn’t want him every week. I had him every weekend and I was literally changing their nappies, doing little meals, everything else. Actually, I’ve got to digress again before I go back to the other one. I’ll give you a good story too. You’ve probably heard the term, excuse me, that you don’t have to be a female to be a mother. Okay? Now, normally I would agree, but unfortunately I have facts that prove that wrong.

(43:51)
When my son was about two years old and my daughter was about six months, we’d already split. It had been a while. And my kids would come over for access and they would call me mom. Alright? I didn’t think too much of it at the time, and I didn’t really care. And this went on for at least six months until my older sister got jack of it and tried to brainwashing the division. I was dad. And after they stopped doing it, I thought, why are they calling me mom? And I worked it out because my wife who hooked up, well pre immediately with someone else had a male counterpart. The male counterpart was dad and she was the mom. Alright, that makes sense. But then I’m a guy, why am I’m a mom? Can you work out why I’m a mom? Can anyone answer that question? Send a text, send a message. No, I’m

Leigh Chalker (44:51):
Talking to, I dunno. I dunno.

Joseph Italiano (44:54):
It’s so obvious. I’m actually giving you the answer. But you haven’t tweaked.

Leigh Chalker (44:58):
No, I haven’t clicked.

Joseph Italiano (45:00):
Alright. So the reason they called me mom was because it wasn’t based on sex, right? It was based on the job description I did when they were with me, what their mom did with them. I would feed them, I would change their nappies, I would bath them. I was doing the mother job. The dad didn’t do any of that. So I was mum, which I thought was interesting. And this is coming from some innocent kids that haven’t been contaminated anyway, saying, yep, you are doing that. You are doing that. That’s what it’s,

Leigh Chalker (45:37):
Yeah, yeah.

Joseph Italiano (45:38):
Strange

Leigh Chalker (45:40):
Children I guess. But I suppose that’s they learn in the environment. But man, so you know that I’m on a bit of a, my dad, I have a sister that I have only just reconnected with in the last couple of years. And when my mom and dad split up, my dad had another relationship and Alex was born. And that, again, moving away from all intricacies of it, it didn’t end well. And it involved interstate travel, et cetera, et cetera. And my dad through his, he was a marathon runner and he was very social, very community minded. He started meeting other fathers that didn’t have access to their children, were also meeting difficulties with seeing their kids. And my dad started an organisation in Townsville called Men’s United. And I, being a young fella, didn’t really think much of this. I was about 15, I was playing sport and the whole world, you don’t understand being

Joseph Italiano (47:01):
Normal. That’s pretty weird. Are you sure you’re in the comics? You’re too normal to be in the comics.

Leigh Chalker (47:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I got to about 18 and I went to my dad’s house to see him. And in the house was a fellow that I had been to school with and he was in there going through an awful lot of sadness. And my dad was, I guess mentoring him through how he had to go through courts and things like that. And I was really like, that was my first introduction to people having difficulties in separations and kids being caught in the middle. And then a few years later, my dad was going to run from Townsville to Parliament House in Canberra. And he got the, I actually went with him when I was 19 to our member who was Peter Lindsay at the time, our mp. And he had back dad and the prime minister at the time was John Howard. John Howard was in this man’s office.

(48:09)
And my dad had a meeting with him and John Howard said, mate, if you can get there on this date, we will organise it. We will bring in, it’s something that needs to be looked at, blah blah, blah. He got the clearance from the Queensland State Police to run on roads. You’ve got travel with cars and stuff like that, like a crew that follow you. And Queensland was all good. Dad trained man for years to probably, no, actually he was always running anyway, but he increased his man, dude was running nonstop ridiculous amounts of kilometres a week. And they got down to man something ridiculous like 3% body fat. You know what I mean? He was fit and man ready to go, the crew ready to go. He was raising money, wanted to allow people to bring this to public attention and stuff like that. And for some particular reason, I guess it was because the New South Wales parliament, state Parliament was of obviously the other side of politics than the other states at the time. Said, no, you’re not getting a licence to run through the state. And it’s scuttled that planned, I guess charitable public awareness initiative for that cause. And yeah, I saw how I did see how much that affected him meant and the people that were going to his house for mentoring and things like that. So in my own way, not myself, I don’t have children, but I have seen how kids are affected and fathers and mothers too. Like everyone’s affected.

Joseph Italiano (49:53):
Part of the problem is the family court itself. The family court itself is a very weird court. Technically it’s not a legal court in Australia because our constitution basically says, you can be tried by your peers, but it’s not your peers. And the problem with the family court is the judges are all tend to be upper class and aren’t familiar with the problems. My biggest problem when I went was that the judge I got was not only so up crust, he didn’t know anything, but he was bigoted. I was taking my kids to playgroups. I had a bunch of moms that thought I was wonderful, mom, dad, whatever. I had them come in and support me. I was telling what I was doing. The judge literally without saying it to my face, said, you are lying. You can’t cook. You can’t look after kids. You can’t, right?

(50:48)
He just couldn’t believe that a guy could do those jobs. And it’s like, well you’re obviously not a parent because any dad will do it if he has to. Some are better than others. But that’s the problem. You’re faced with a family court. You’ve got a situation where if you, you’re a female, you’re right because you’re the mom. That’s it. Traditional role, the whole bit. Things that they don’t really want to do, they don’t want to be a traditional female, but they get all the benefits of it. And if you’re a man, you can’t do it the end and it sucks, which is why you have so many problems with the family court.

Leigh Chalker (51:23):
Yeah, look, again, I can’t say yay or no to that man. I’ve not been involved personally. I can just only add to the conversation from what I saw my dad go through, you know what I mean? And other friends of mine that have been through scenarios

Joseph Italiano (51:40):
That is real, it’s stressful. I mean it’s not firsthand, but you’re getting firsthand information, which is very important, which I’ve digress again, which is why I’m writing the book. Anyway, going back, I forgot where I’m going back to.

Leigh Chalker (51:59):
This is it chin the flow.

Joseph Italiano (52:05):
Why aren’t we talking about the family court? Anyway, I

Leigh Chalker (52:08):
Dunno. We digress, which means,

Joseph Italiano (52:11):
Okay, so I can remember now. So the budget running through, it’s obviously in ridiculous amount of debt. All we took, but we’re surviving and chugging through and we found out something rather unfortunate. And that is when things are down for some reason, whether it’s karma or just you need to be tested yet again because you haven’t proved yourself, shit happens. And I mean it does. So every time we’d make a gain or something, we’d be getting back on top of things. We’d have something. For example, one of the biggest things that just about killed almost everybody was the global financial crisis at that point. Everything’s steaming, yet we’re going to be right. We only need six months. Great, boom. What sales are down? You can’t do anything. You can’t. And this has been the standard, not just for our business but for many others. It’s just so many things that are out of your control happen. Going back to my great wonderful class of make an artistic thing out of anything you can that pretty much applied to the business. It’s like, okay, so we’re doing A, B, C, D, E, they’re all working, but not enough quick. Invent something else, right? We do fgh h Yeah, it’s working. We’re getting, oh shit, now something else happened, right? Let’s do ij. And that’s pretty much what the business was. We’d have to keep reinventing ourselves just to keep going.

Leigh Chalker (53:43):
You got to work. Okay, maybe that’s where all that unique artistic teaching may have had a little sprinkle.

Joseph Italiano (53:53):
Oh look, it did. I got a lot of, how would you say, education at college, but none of it was to do with art. It was all to do with life and other experience.

Leigh Chalker (54:04):
Is this like that kiss song mate? You know what I mean? They taught me things in school. How’d that go? I dunno what the lyric is, but

Joseph Italiano (54:12):
Well, they did. I can tell you some more stories about school and some of the really dumb things I did. Well, I’ll sum it up in one word. Okay, so a couple of sentences.

Leigh Chalker (54:26):
I

Joseph Italiano (54:26):
Didn’t look a few words.

Leigh Chalker (54:28):
I was like, is it going to be one word? And then you went, oh, couple of sentence.

Joseph Italiano (54:33):
When I eventually graduated, oh, you are frozen. When I eventually graduated, I was personally congratulated by the dean of the art school, the only person, and complimented by pretty much all the major teachers. Now there’s a reason for that, which I’m not going to go into.

Leigh Chalker (54:55):
Are you sure?

Joseph Italiano (55:00):
Yeah, I’m sure.

Leigh Chalker (55:03):
But

Joseph Italiano (55:04):
I was the only one and it was because of the things I learned about life and not about the course. And as I said, I learned them at college and that’s what got me through. I suppose it’s part of my philosophy a bit like a quote from Galaxy Quest, never give up, never surrender. And I don’t, the closest I got to that actually not being true was with my ex. I literally tried absolutely everything to patch things. I couldn’t patch things and I didn’t find out why it would never work until later and it wasn’t going to work. But that was a case of she doesn’t want it to happen no matter what I do, so it can’t work.

(55:56)
But I did consider that giving it up and that’s what tends to get you through things. I mean, one of the things people don’t tend to realise, it doesn’t matter what you do or what business you’re in. I mean Arnold squash niggas got a great little blurb where he says the same sort of thing too. And it’s basically there’s too many people that are afraid of failure. And to me, failure was never, well, not so much an option, but nothing to worry about. My upbringing was very weird and different, but one thing that was instilled in me was you can do anything you want. People say you shouldn’t teach that to kids, but I say you should because anyone can do anything they want if they try and everyone goes, oh, but so-and-so did this. I can never do that. I go, yeah, but so-and-so went through 10 years to hell, went bankrupt three times and did all this other stuff before he got there.

(56:53)
I mean Walt Digit is a great example. He went bankrupt twice, right? Colonel Sanders didn’t actually start his business until was in his sixties because he was going to starve to death. It’s never too late. And you can do it and if the world tells you you can’t, then they’re wrong. Right? Well, one of the things that the education system has taught us now is learn your one profession and do your one thing. And I’m going, well, I don’t want to be a cog a wheel. I remember my dad, he had so many different talents and if you want to be particular, let’s go back to pioneers, let’s go back to Australian pioneers, American pioneers. Did you think when they came out here on penal ships, they bought a bunch of plumbers and builders to make their stuff? No, they did everything. They did all the woodworking, the farming, they did the whole thing. It’s not a single talent. And the easiest way to explain it is when they give you two choices, we won’t go into politics, but it’s a two choice syndrome. And it’s like, please tell me what in this world, what in this universes is actually limited to two choices. If you go to a restaurant, you get an option of two meals, that’s it. If you want to go buy clothes, you get two choices.

(58:11)
There is an infinite number of choices and there is an infinite number of options. And everybody has a talent. It might be something dumb like you can flick your snot more than anybody else, but everyone’s got a talent. Hey, don’t laugh, there are people that have gotten money for doing dumb stuff like that. It’s a paid talent. And the thing is, you just got to keep going until you find it. And people give up. One of the best things I learned about fail is the anagram, whatever it stands for, what fail stands for, this is what fail stands for. Fail stands for first attempt in learning. That’s what it means. And people go, don’t be ridiculous. Okay, look, I’ll give you an example, let’s take a baby. The nice thing about babies, I love babies. The nice thing about babies and kids is that they’re innocent and they haven’t been contaminated. Irrespective of what age a baby starts to walk or learns to walk, six months, two years, whatever. Let’s assume this baby has mentality of someone who’s been educated. The baby gets up, tries to walk, fall over, that’s it, I’m done. Never do it again. I can’t do it. The end. It’s like they don’t do that. It’s like, get up, fall over, get up, fall. And they keep doing it until they get it right. And that’s pretty much what life is. You keep going, you don’t keep going, you might as well be dead.

(59:46)
And I don’t know why I’m talking about why am I talking about this now?

Leigh Chalker (59:49):
I dunno, mate, you just caught. Love it. It’s magic to me. I love, love gas bagging the people.

(59:58)
Well, I’m Tuesdays, but look man, I got brought up. I’ve said it often on this show and anyone that knows me well enough is I got brought up in a family that basically said, if you listen to people that tell you you can’t do anything, man, you just won’t get anything done. So it’s a lot of my family were hardworking dudes, man and ladies that had multiple jobs and did their things and followed their passions as best they could and never let anyone stand in their way. They were all very, like the Macintosh side of the family, which were mum’s side. They’re all very stern driven people, man, that they’d get knocked down, they’d dust themselves off, man, okay, boom, step up and go again. And it’s good quality to have. It’s well, it’s

Joseph Italiano (01:00:52):
A quality everyone has, but it gets, how do you say, educated out of you because you’re not compliant if you do your own thing. I mean, if you look at history, the bits I like everyone and anyone that has ever done anything of significance was either persecuted, hated, revile, tormented or tortured until they went, oh shit, you’re right. No one came up with a great idea and they said, oh yeah, we’ll change that. It’s always been a struggle. And if you didn’t have these people, we’d still be in the stone age.

Leigh Chalker (01:01:35):
What progress is sacrifice to a certain extent and people just having a belief in the compulsion. Their own personal drive like you were touching on before is I think I went through a long period where I wasn’t a hundred percent calibrated man for quite some time, a long few years. And since then, I guess to make sense for me what works is I went down a path of meditation and things like that. And one of my conversations that I’ve had with my teacher and things was, you always read about paths, what you’re meant to do, blah, blah, blah. And I was always like, man, I don’t know. I don’t know, it’s just everything’s so complicated and shit. And Valerie said to me, she goes, easy question. You should be able to answer this. What was the first thing you were passionate about when you were a little child?

(01:02:43)
And I said, oh, drawing, art, creating. And she’s like, you still do it? And I’m like, every day. And she’s like, there’s your answer from what? And that’s what she said. So I guess it’s touching on what you are sort of suggesting is that thing you pick up as a kid, that thing that you get out of bed you want to do, whether it’s cricket or cooking or gardening or whatever it is, man, everyone’s different. But that was mine and that was very clear when it was simplified and some things, life does get complicated, Joe. There’s a lot of things that

Joseph Italiano (01:03:22):
Life doesn’t get complicated.

Leigh Chalker (01:03:24):
It can be

Joseph Italiano (01:03:25):
Everybody else. Makes it complicated.

Leigh Chalker (01:03:27):
Well, can stay isolated. Life is

Joseph Italiano (01:03:30):
Simple. What life is.

Leigh Chalker (01:03:32):
Life

Joseph Italiano (01:03:33):
Is getting up, having food and doing stuff. That’s true. The problem is you can’t do that. You can’t live your life because you’ve got all this other stuff you have to do to be able to have a life. Who would go and work five days a week if they didn’t have to? You could live your life, right? I mean, I probably would. I enjoy the comic stuff, but that’s another story most people don’t, and even if you did, it wouldn’t be for that long. It’s gotten complicated.

Leigh Chalker (01:04:07):
In response to that, if you are following your path and you were passionate and you were doing it five days a week, would it indeed be work or would it be play?

Joseph Italiano (01:04:18):
Yes,

Leigh Chalker (01:04:20):
It would be play

Joseph Italiano (01:04:22):
Both, but yes. Well, most days I go to work and it’s not work.

Leigh Chalker (01:04:27):
Yeah.

Joseph Italiano (01:04:28):
All right. The tedious part of work is all the paperwork and the technical bits and we had a saying back when we were at 76 Chapel Street because there would be so much stuff that would go wrong all the time and it’s like, oh look, we’ve only had three disasters before lunch. It’s a like day today. And I’m not talking about, oh, someone spilled coffee. I’m talking about, oh, the banks rang up and said they’re going to cancel your overdraft or something. What happened there? It’d be really serious stuff. Oh, well the current supplier isn’t going to give it to you now for some reason. Oh, that’s the other thing we should mention too, because we’ve been around for a long time. We dealt with pretty much every distributor that existed back in the day. There was probably about 16 distributors scattered across the US and we used pretty much all of them for various reasons because unlike what people are used to, a lot of stuff was regional access only.

(01:05:33)
So we were using distributors from the Y all across the states and we made a lot of contacts, which is why a lot of people know who I am in the industry. In the US we’ve been around so long and a lot of them have Pacific Comics, which actually was a distribution as well. Those guys have moved on to Diamond. The capital City guys the same. Same. So there’s a lot of overlap and I find it funny at the moment that so many stores are complaining, oh, I’m going to deal with two distributors. I’m going, what are you complaining about? We were dealing with 16 and before the internet too. Yeah, yeah. This is by phone and mail. Yeah, and if you were really high tech, you had facts. Oh, look, we didn’t have facts. We did when we had the story winds actually. But yeah, it’s just weird. That’s like you got this system, which short version Diamond eventually was the only entity left. That’s another long story. We won’t get into that either. And you are complaining because they didn’t do something right. It’s like, do you have any idea what they’re trying to do? When they were it, they were supplying the worldwide market of comic shops with thousands of manufacturers and products and you are upset they missed the comic, give ’em a break and then you’re cheering when they’re starting to die. Do you realise what would happen if they died?

(01:07:08)
If Diamond dies, I suspect the comic industry will follow because the big distributors now don’t care about comic shops. That’s why you’ve lost almost 50%. They want the quick buck and that’s the biggest problem you’ve got with the comic industry. They’re trying to turn it over fast and they don’t care about the consequences. They look at one aspect of something like one of the reasons DC went away from Diamond originally with two distributors now down to one was, oh look, we sell this many books trades and we sell ’em in bookshops. If we take over, we can sell so many more. Okay, so that’s the fact they took, which is correct. They didn’t take everything else that went with it. So when they went away, they went quick. Let’s print a whole bunch of trades. Most of them were original trades, most of them were complete garbage.

(01:08:04)
And what they also forgot was that bookshops can return crap. They were getting 95% plus return rate. They were making less, not more. And that’s because they didn’t look at all the facts. They sacked most of the people that knew what was going in the industry. And that’s why you have such a AMO at the moment. Why do you think the industry at the moment is so crazy, right? I mean, we had a week where there was seven different Batman titles out a month or two ago. Why is there seven Batman titles in one week? Couldn’t you space them out at least for the month? I mean DC’s

Leigh Chalker (01:08:47):
With that in particular, sorry to interject, but that interests me seven in one week. How many were over the month

Joseph Italiano (01:08:56):
More? I stopped counting. I stopped counting. DC has got this strange attitude at the moment, right? They’re saying we want Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (01:09:08):
They’re treating and

Joseph Italiano (01:09:09):
A couple of fillers. So pretty much everything else is literally feller and that’s why you’ve got such a weird selection of stuff and I don’t want to go too much into it, but like everybody else who are in DEI, which is fine and I have no objection to that, but the trouble with their DEI is the same as everybody else. The qualifications for the person isn’t their skill, their reputation, their body of works if they’re DEI. So you’re getting people that can’t write for peanuts. You’re getting in movies, you’re getting it in comics, and they’re killing it at the moment. If you look at comic sales, the US comics are shrinking. Do you know what’s replacing it?

Leigh Chalker (01:09:54):
Manga?

Joseph Italiano (01:09:55):
Yeah. Do you know why Manga is replacing it? Because they’re well written. It’s that simple.

Leigh Chalker (01:10:01):
Yeah. Would I be incorrect in also thinking that being printed in China, like bulk quantities for cheaper than American Western printers can do, may have something to do with

Joseph Italiano (01:10:15):
No, it doesn’t make any difference at all. We get enough stuff to tell you that half the American US stuff is printed in China or Thailand or whatever else. They don’t tend to use American printers because they’re cheap asses and they’re expensive. All this wonderful stuff about support your country, blah, blah, blah. It only works as long as you do it. They don’t have to do it. So no, the printing doesn’t make any difference. And you’ve also got the other problem at the moment as well in case you don’t know that they’ve still got paper shortages. Most of the paper comes out of China as well, and China still hasn’t quite got their act together as far as that’s concerned. So you’re getting restrictions on how much stuff you can print. That’s why a lot of trades aren’t being reprinted. The main reason why a lot of manga is running out of particular volume, so you’ll have a series that’s stunningly well, but you can’t get issue one or whatever it is because they haven’t gotten enough pay to print it and they’re going to make more by printing the new issue than an old issue.

(01:11:15)
So you’ve got this disparity with what’s available, but it’s got nothing to do with the American market because if it’s cheaper anywhere else, they jump straight away.

Leigh Chalker (01:11:25):
Right. Okay.

Joseph Italiano (01:11:27):
The biggest stage you’ve got at the moment is if comic shops keep failing and trying to survive on comics is not the way to go. Right? The American comic shops at a comic exclusive are struggling, and I’ve seen it here as well. We pick up our shipment once a week and mainly because if we wait for them to deliver it because we’re out of suburbs, they might not get it to us till 5:00 PM at which point we don’t want to work till 3:00 AM So we pick it up and occasionally we see what everyone’s bringing in and it’s changed. There’s two major things that have changed change. Number one is the volume that everybody brings in has shrunk dramatically. Change number two, without saying who, there is only three Melbourne stores that bring in stuff every week. Everybody else is fortnightly or monthly, which is step one of death meal. And that’s not counting the what, five stores that have already died Australia wide the last couple of years that are significant. I mean, you obviously heard about dying and the saddest thing about them dying was we’re not doing anything wrong. We have all our customers, they just can’t afford to buy enough.

(01:12:43)
And that’s across the board. The whole situation is kind of crazy. And that’s partly because if you’re a straight comic shop, there’s not enough market anymore.

Leigh Chalker (01:12:53):
Yeah,

Joseph Italiano (01:12:55):
I mean we’ve always been,

Leigh Chalker (01:12:57):
You also think that I’m just asking questions because obviously it Yeah, shoot, no

Joseph Italiano (01:13:06):
One else is.

Leigh Chalker (01:13:07):
Yeah, yeah. No. Ask

Joseph Italiano (01:13:10):
Questions, people

Leigh Chalker (01:13:11):
Anything. Yeah, well, there probably is. Scissor is probably just letting us have a yarn man. But yeah, do ask questions if anyone’s got any. Feel free you from someone that’s owned a comic bookshop for an incredibly long time. Hey naughties, how you going, man? What are your thoughts on the whole Kickstarter revolution and things like that? I guess the Go Fund mes and all these other things that are happening to allow independent comic book creators to, I guess sort of in its own way. I mean Kickstarters to an extended distribution, isn’t it? You know what I mean? With the pledging, the addressing the person prints, it, sends it off, that sort of thing. Have you found that that has any sort of adverse effect to your place?

Joseph Italiano (01:14:07):
It doesn’t have the adverse effect you are talking about, right? If a product is not available in the comic store, it doesn’t affect the comic store. The problem where I have with Kickstarter, well, the problem I see with Kickstarter isn’t that the problem is that you have a limited market which you hit and you absorb. And then a lot of people say, we want to get into a store and stores go, but you’ve taken the market, there’s no more market left, so you don’t get it into stores. And that’s a bad situation because it means you miss out on people who haven’t seen it to be able to see it.

(01:14:48)
So it’s sort of self-defeating. You have your market and you’re going to develop a little bubble and that’s it. I mean, we still like to take Australian comics and realistically speaking, there’s no money in it. We’re probably losing money by having them because they take up shelf space and they’re slow, but we like to support it. We always have, but Kickstarters are even worse. At least if it’s something that’s just come out and we get it, we’re more likely to sell it. I’m not going to name you guys, but there’s a couple of people there that are supposed to have brought us stuff that’s been out for a while and we still haven’t got it. Right. You know who you are and

Leigh Chalker (01:15:27):
Friendly reminder before. Well, the

Joseph Italiano (01:15:29):
Thing is, it’s also educational, right? It teaches people, I can’t get it at a comic shop anymore. It’s been out for three months, it’s not there. It never’s going to come out. And as I said, if you don’t have it on the shelf, if it doesn’t get exposed, no one will be able to buy it. And we had this situation in the gaming industry as well. Again, a similar thing. We had a distributor who was not particularly up and up, they were wholesale into the public and we’re making buckets, but it was a short term gain because what happens was the gaming store stopped buying the stuff from them because there’s no point. You’re undercutting this, which meant a lot of this stuff didn’t get exposure. And after a while, your customers saturate with what you’ve got. You get limited amount of new customers. No one’s seeing this stuff on the shelf. They dunno what exists. So the market for those products just dies. And that’s the problem I see with Kickstarter. What I’ve told people that do Kickstarter is you should do different versions, you should do a Kickstarter version and you should do a retail version at least that way it’s something slightly different. But even then, how many people want to buy two of the same book?

Leigh Chalker (01:16:45):
When you mentioned that like a Kickstarter version and a retail shop version, would you be suggesting variant covers like a retail shop cover as opposed to

Joseph Italiano (01:16:59):
Something like that? Yeah. I dunno how well it’ll work because I said, I dunno how many people buy multiple copies, but at least that way it’s something that’s different and it gives you a chance to sell it in the store. But a lot of people don’t realise that without being in the store, without getting visibility, which is literally advertising, right? Even if they don’t buy it straight off, they see it every month, every quarter, whatever, it’ll twig. It gives you a chance to expand the market and you can’t grow without expanding. Again. I’ve heard people say the problem with Kickstarter is it’s the same group of people buy the same sort of stuff. It doesn’t grow. So okay, let’s say you’ve got 500 people on that list. Well, you’re never going to sell more than 500 because no one else is going to see it. And I’m sure you all want to grow and to grow, you’re going to go into additional markets. What’s your obvious additional market comic shop? But if you are competing with ’em with the same product and you’re selling it first and you’re giving special bonuses, they’re not going to be that keen to take it because it’s going to be dead space.

Leigh Chalker (01:18:09):
Well, some of the people that I speak to that I’ve met over time, particularly in America, man, they have their publishing houses and stuff through Kickstarter and they’ve built up businesses that way, but they find it a little bit difficult at the start to get into comic book shops because from talking to them, I always ask like, look man, I like asking why, okay, I like to just know, but why

(01:18:41)
Things? And all information’s good, man, you can work it out for yourself and just learn learning’s a good thing, time for why. And they were suggesting that they were getting into difficulty with some comic shops not taking their stuff. And very similar, my understanding from what they were telling me is what you were suggesting is the shops in America were like, man, you no market. You’ve used your market. That sort of a stuff. So I mean look, Joe, I’m pro comic books, man, I love comic books. I just want to make it clear to you because we’ve just met, I love comic books that love creating them. I love drawing them. I love reading them. I love standing in the shop smelling them. I know that sounds weird, but it’s just one of those weird things. I like the

Joseph Italiano (01:19:38):
Old one smell better.

Leigh Chalker (01:19:39):
Yeah, man, they smell good. I mean, I don’t take in salt and pepper and stuff and chew on ’em or anything, so don’t stress about that. But I love comic books, man. So I guess that’s why I just like to ask so many questions is because having you on the here now and some months ago I had Mel Briggs from Impact and things like that. It’s really important I think for people out there listening just to try and understand what is happening out there because not even I understand all the nuances and things like that too, particularly from someone like yourself, man, who’s been in the game for so long knows an awful lot. So Ray, you,

Joseph Italiano (01:20:23):
I’ll tell you what we’re doing, Ray,

Leigh Chalker (01:20:26):
To improve the exposure of Australian comic books.

Joseph Italiano (01:20:29):
Well, what we do is every six months we hold what we call a local comic creator day. We get a bunch of creators come in, we give them a free stall at the back of the shop, we give ’em a plug and they get to sell their stuff. We don’t charge ’em anything. If they don’t sell anything, we lose because we feed ’em as well. If they sell stuff, we get a small percentage of what they sold back in stock. So we just get to stock to shop with it and that gives them exposure. They also get diminished. It’s a bit of a party action. I think most of ’em come for the Oli now rather than for anything else. But we do that every six months. And then as I said, we have the stuff in store and what that also does is because whenever we get autographed, we give COAs to it. So it’s a little bit different to what you would get in your Kickstarter or whatever, which gives us a better chance to sell it. And again, it gives them exposure. So you can do stuff like that, but that’s a polite way to put it. It’s a lot of work and it’s really more just a PR exercise cost-wise, I’m an idiot. I’m losing money, but money, I know this comes to shock. It’s not the most important thing. I like to make people happy. I have a very weird trade,

Leigh Chalker (01:21:52):
Local creative days, best days, Danny, and thank you very much Ray for that previous comment about great work. Sorry. Yeah, look,

Joseph Italiano (01:22:03):
That’s alright. I mean they’re more like a social event. We used to have a little stall at the backside. Australian comic, we don’t bother anymore. I don’t have time. I usually spend most time either cooking food and chatting or just cooking food depending on how many people we’ve got. But it’s a great little social exercise as well. And as I said, it gives exposure. I mean it doesn’t hurt us. Obviously at worst we get a few people coming in that might not come in, but people get exposure and that’s the sort of thing you want to do because it supports the shop as well as the creators. I mean in the good old days before we had Kickstarter, we used to stock Australian comics as well. If you go through some of the old Australian comic books, you’ll find our ads in ’em. I think again in the book, but I’ll give you a preview.

(01:22:54)
One of the first comic books, Australian comic books we had in store was Bug and Stump number one. Now there was a bug and Stump number zero. Number zero was a collection of a newspaper strips that they did for the uni and they published it as a comic book the uni did. That was part of the condition. So people were familiar with it. We gave Mark Sexton and John, I can’t pronounce his name. It starts with me exposure. And we had issue one come out in our store. Now back in the good old days, we were Southern like 500 plus X-Men have a guess how many copies of Bug and Stump one we sold Australian comic

Leigh Chalker (01:23:42):
Matched it.

Joseph Italiano (01:23:44):
No, it was more really bug stump outsold X-Men that week. It was about five 50 I think, right? And that was without Kickstarter band. I don’t know how many other stores at that time had taken it. I think there would’ve volume been mini or they might’ve taken, I don’t know. And that was unexpected for us. We just kept getting copies, kept selling.

Leigh Chalker (01:24:09):
Yeah. Do you think, judge, on those numbers there, Joe, do you think obviously late nineties to now as 25 year difference, what do you attribute to, you’ve mentioned previously Bug and Stump and those comic books selling X-Men selling large numbers in a week. What do you think contributed to I suppose lack of those numbers meant or the fact

Joseph Italiano (01:24:40):
The drop in sales,

(01:24:43)
Multiple things. Number one, there’s more comic stores. Number two, they’re more accessible. Like if you wanted to buy a comic in Australia at that point in time and you wanted to get it within without waiting three months, you had to go to a comic shop and there wasn’t that many. Now you can order it anywhere from any place, evil Amazon, that will literally throw it in a bag and don’t care how it arrives to any internet online store, which is convenient but also bad because the problem with online stores is the same with Kickstarter. You’re selling to your established market and if there’s no comic shops to advertise what exists, your internet store is dead. Secondly, they’re pumping out a lot of stuff that is of much lower quality. I have seen so many DC reboots, I can’t count. There’s been so many if and a crisises, there’s been so many rehashes of the same, oh, this I was, do it again. It’s like think of something new, I literally can’t handle it. And then on top of that, they’re trying to cater to a market that doesn’t exist.

(01:26:02)
A lot of the stuff has been designed for the DEI inclusion, whatever you want to call it. And the silly thing about that is the percentage of people in that market is like, well, it was I think either 2% or 0.2. I think it was 2%. It might’ve grown to 4% now because it’s trended to be one if you not otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re aiming for a 4% population and out of that 4% population, the number of com collectors is like what 0.04%? How are you going to survive? Even if everyone in that 0.04% buys it and you get a few hardcore buy it, that’s not enough. The market you’re aiming for can’t support it. The most obvious example was that was when they did the gay romcom. The gays didn’t like it and it’s like, but you’re aiming for this market, which is small anyway. Even if they all came, you wouldn’t make any money. They didn’t like it. How do you expect it to go somewhere? The problem is that they’re aiming at the wrong audiences.

(01:27:11)
You see it with DC more originally where they take a great DC story and then the executives would fix it and make it completely horrible. Marvel started off the right way. They take a good story and they’d adapt it to the medium without changing the essence. Now they do, and soon as they do that, they kill it. You remember when Angela was a creation for Spawn Angela? Shit, hot character, sexy yourself, great stuff. Had the big dispute with Neil Gaman and McFarlane because McFarlane started image so he would not be the evil big two. So now he evil big three and there was a big court action. Gayman wrote 1652 for Marble to fund his court case. He won and went, yep, see you were wrong. Marble said, can we have it? He goes, yeah, I don’t give a shit. Have it. And he gave it to Marble.

(01:28:07)
We thought, great, we’re going to get Angela now. Terrific. So what did they do with Angela? Well, the first storyline arc they did, they made a gay and she spent the entire time going into hell, beating up everybody to become leader of hell to get her dead girlfriend out and come out. It’s like, that’s not why people liked Angela. You’ve just mangled the character. If you really think that’s going to be a good story, don’t use Angela. Make up another story with a different character. You can’t change a basic character, which is what is done all the time at the moment. The last Superman movie series, who’s the actor that does that? I forgot his name, I know his name. Henry Cavel Henry. I love Henry Cavel. He, I think he’s a terrible Superman. Not because he can’t act, but because he’ll stand there and you’ll look at him and he looks like he’s about to kill you, right? Christopher Reeves would be Superman. He’d smile and he’d just be goodness at you, right? What did they do with Superman? They made him die. What did he do in his first movie? He killed someone.

Leigh Chalker (01:29:19):
He killed God. Yeah.

Joseph Italiano (01:29:21):
A five-year-old kid knows that Superman doesn’t kill people. Who are you appealing to? You’ve just destroyed the character. And that’s one of the things they keep doing. They keep trying to reinvent or change established stuff. And that to me is lazy writing. If you really think you have a good idea about some gay character, then write a good story. Don’t make Alan Scott Gay all of a sudden, right? It doesn’t work. This is, why

Leigh Chalker (01:29:53):
Would you think that with so many? Because these characters don’t just change the wants to follow. They seem to chop and change an awful lot. I mean, this is horrible for me to say this to a comic book shop owner, but man, I was rattling through comic books like five, six years ago and I love X-Men, like everyone that’s watched the show and that’ll know that from my Marvel stuff to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of X-Men comics. And I just got to a point where then you’re right about certain things, certain characters were changing, certain characters were evil then good and then not so good and you couldn’t keep track of anything and they’d change in this and then quickly change over. And it was very difficult to keep track of men. But I suppose everything is a sign of the times, isn’t it?

Joseph Italiano (01:30:50):
Some of the times. So what you’re saying is we are basically in shit. Mill Xmen is a good example too, right? It is, as you say. Well,

Leigh Chalker (01:30:59):
I dunno if I said we’re in Shitville.

Joseph Italiano (01:31:08):
You’ve just yourself up to both barrels. You’re a big fan, a big X-Men collector and you’ve just said, I’m not buying anymore because

Leigh Chalker (01:31:19):
I haven’t bought

Joseph Italiano (01:31:21):
Them anymore because they’re shit not

Leigh Chalker (01:31:25):
As good as they were pickle.

Joseph Italiano (01:31:32):
They do too many changes. Too many changes, too many reboots. And the thing is with the reboots as well is they don’t even do something new, right? I’m sick of, oh look, it’s another big wedding of the same character to the same person again, and then they’re not married anymore. And now look, they’ve had a baby. Oh no, we’ve rewritten it. There’s no baby now. And oh look, it’s a new origin again. Okay, what’s a new origin? It’s exactly the same. Same. But it’s a new art. I mean, one of the things I was so pissed off about was that the Batman Catwoman wedding issue, and this one I will mention names. I feel really sorry for King’s Comics, right? King’s comics ordered especially exclusive of that issue because it was a big wedding issue and if you get a DC exclusive, you’ve got to pay a lot of money. And then they screwed us. They went, look, they didn’t get married and they didn’t get married for the dumbest of reasons. Do you remember why they didn’t get married?

Leigh Chalker (01:32:34):
No, I didn’t read it.

Joseph Italiano (01:32:36):
Alright, Catwoman and Batman are going to get married.

Leigh Chalker (01:32:40):
Batman mate.

Joseph Italiano (01:32:43):
They actually had a good issue, I think issue 49. You had Catwoman sneak out of the bed, go to a bridal shop in the middle of the night, steal a gown for the wedding guest because she has to steal it. She’s Catwoman. That was almost you. Then they had the wedding, alright? And the wedding was we’re going to get married at the place we first met. They both went to different places. They both waited and got pissed off with each other. Now that is got to be the lamest excuse ever, right? Let’s just flip, forget, let’s be Batman, right? Batman the world’s greatest detective. She didn’t show up. There’s two reasons. She’s either dead or has been beaten to a pole or I’ve got it wrong. Now I’m going to sit here and say she changed her mind. What kind of a detective is that? It’s the worst reason possible not to get married,

Leigh Chalker (01:33:38):
Joe. Man, I dunno. For me with comic books, man, I’ve seen some crazy stuff over the years, man. I try and find a joy in them. I find when they get too serious and I like escapism, you know what I mean? You like

Joseph Italiano (01:34:07):
Escapism. I know what you mean.

Leigh Chalker (01:34:08):
Yeah, man. It’s like watching a 90 minute movie. One of my things, and people hate me for this, I do love epic movies, you know what I mean? I love classic epic movies. I love Lawrence Arabia and Dr. Varga. I go way back to them. I can watch them all day, but it’s like sometimes, and I love big series and stuff, that’s good, but sometimes you just want that 90 minute boom, like a Highlander or something. You can sit down for 90 minutes, not think too much. It’s just there you go. And it’s done. And I just don’t really give, for me, I don’t really give much credence to the whys and the wherefores of why people make their creative decisions. Man. I think one of the things of myself being a creator with my comic books and stuff is I just found to a certain extent when I really started to get into my comic work, man, I noticed that if I was reading too many other people’s comic books and stuff, it started creeping into what I was trying to do. Do you know what I mean? So I sort of had to I what

Joseph Italiano (01:35:20):
You mean?

Leigh Chalker (01:35:21):
Yeah, I had alienating myself, man. So it’s like I don’t read, man. I’ll be dead honest with you. I don’t read any of the major labels I prefer. I love Australian comic books. They’re some of the first ones I bought as a kid. And much like we were talking about a path beforehand is I inadvertently found myself coming back to what I loved when my dad collected them and when I got the opportunity to buy comic books, it was things like bug and stump issue one anthology, those sorts of things. And from being and doing Australian comic books now, I just sort of left. No offence to anyone that buys ’em, absolutely love them. Comics are good. I’m saying this is pro comics, it’s all pro comic books, whatever your tastes are because if everyone in the world was the same, it’d be boring. But I just found coming back into Australian comic books, man, and much like you’ve said tonight with your creator meetups and stuff you do every six months getting to meet people and talk to people and do those sorts of things, man, I find myself maybe a little bit closer to home, more interested in the health of Australian comic book community industry creators and people that contribute men in terms of shops and things like that.

(01:36:51)
I guess people may call me narrow-minded perhaps to an extent, but I don’t know, man, the Batmans and the X-Men and stuff like that, I feel like I sort of read those comic books when I was younger. You know what I mean?

Joseph Italiano (01:37:08):
You’re partly right. I wouldn’t call you narrow. I’d call you limited. And the reason being, it’s not an insult. Okay? The reason I call you limited,

Leigh Chalker (01:37:21):
I’m here to learn,

Joseph Italiano (01:37:23):
Is if you limit yourself to one particular field, you’re doing the same thing in a different field. If you want to have a broad view of everything, you have to experience a broad view. You have to read multiple things, different things, experience different things. I know what you mean by you can be, I suppose, influenced in some way. Not much, but I’ll answer that in a minute. But I find it the other way around. I read stuff I like and the more diversity you have, not DEI, just diversity, the better. I like a lot of interesting history like the Romans, Greeks and mythology and stuff, and they’re all inspirational. I mean, if you want to talk about influence, look at Stan Lee. Look at Fantastic four. Everyone’s great, brilliant. Start the mobile age. There’s not one original character. Every one of those characters appeared as something else somewhere else.

(01:38:26)
He did a new take on them, which is the key thing, but nothing’s original. Not that that’s a problem because most original stuff’s already been done. There’s only so much you can do and it’s been done. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. And one of the reasons you want to expose yourself to a lot of different material is so you get new ideas. Now what I find with the stuff I don’t like is that it’s not a new idea. It’s I’m doing what happened before again, and it’s done badly. And back to that question of what I read, I tend to read a lot more independence because they tend to be more experimental. What do you used to get with DC was when AOR did Swamp Thing and going back with things like Sandman and stuff, they were created by accident.

(01:39:18)
They were never designed DC said, Hey, the copyright on these books that we own, these names is going to run out quick, print something. Oh, we got some hacks from England. Give it to them. Just do something. We don’t care what you do. And that’s where they came out. You look at the perennial all time sellers for dc and most of them are all these obscure characters. Why? Because the creators weren’t controlled on what they could do and they went free reign. The problem with all main characters, particularly DC and Marvel, is you’ve got so many rules, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t do that. When New 52 launched, which was more successful than even DC expected after the first issues of pretty much every book, which was brilliant, they came down heavy. You had two Superman titles. They were two years and five years apart.

(01:40:13)
And the guy going, well, what can I do with Lois later? I want to know what happened. Oh, you can’t use it. What about you can’t use Lex? And all of a sudden you couldn’t do anything. That’s why so many of those creators have did good stuff left because the restrictions just came on in a ridiculous way. And you don’t get these restrictions in obscure titles for main publishers or from any independence. Occasionally I will go back and read a mainstream book because there’s something interesting. Magic’s my favourite character, not that anyone’s ever really done a justice. And every time she appears, I’ll give it a shot and go, oh my God, whatcha doing and dump the book again? But I’ll give it a try. And the other problem you’ve got, I don’t want to sling too much mud, but there’s a couple of high profile writers who are brilliant writers when they write the original material.

(01:41:05)
So what do they do? Write for Marvel, write for dc. And what do they do? They ignore all the history, all the continuity, and make up a whole new universe with these characters. And it’s garbage because you’ve just destroyed some collectors like myself, 47 year history plus of what has happened and it doesn’t count anymore. And we’re still kids. We are big kids and we like continuity and we want development. We do want Spider-Man to eventually get married. And oddly enough, they did a series where he got married that took off. So now they’ve done it. They did it with Superman. You can do it, but the problem is you have these stupid restrictions and they’re too afraid to tamper with something that does well. So they constantly repeat the same thing, which kills it.

Leigh Chalker (01:42:00):
Yeah, yeah, no. Well man, I agree with you as obviously what stopped me is in the agreement point is that they do just seem to stick to they

Joseph Italiano (01:42:13):
Just costly repeat.

Leigh Chalker (01:42:14):
And that’s cool. I get it with my point is it’s not just like the Australian comic books. I’m a pretty broad sort of appreciator of many things, as you said, man, novels, art history, paintings, all that. I soak in as much as I can and I’m in a total agreeance with you as to why you went to that art school. Because out of those two art schools, I would’ve gone to the one that you went to as well because it allowed you to be you. It allowed you to be unique and it allowed you to be original. And that is why to a certain extent too, when I decided I was going to go down my lane and telling my story with Battle for Bustle, I knew there was no point being somebody else. And I had to accept the fact that if I’m going to do this, I’ve got to do it my way to a certain extent.

(01:43:20)
And that’s where I was sort of getting at previously with I guess pulling away from certain comics. I just found much like I guess if you’re inundated with heaps of things as a creator, for me anyway, this is just part of my process. I realised that I was just becoming clouded with ideas that seemed original, but then I could web them back to things that I’d read and styles and art and that sort of thing. And I didn’t want to do that. You know what I mean? So I sort of sacrificed the reading to a certain extent to take up the creating side of things. That’s just where I was.

Joseph Italiano (01:44:06):
We are very different that way. I operate about the memoir. I’m not writing a memoir.

Leigh Chalker (01:44:14):
Danny doesn’t write people talking about Art Joe, don’t worry about it. He’s like,

Joseph Italiano (01:44:19):
I’ll give you this point then I’ll go back to what I’m writing. I have a very different i’s say perspective when I look at stuff. I’ll give you an example. The original Suicide Squad movie, which was terrible in so many ways, and I’m sitting there going, why did they do this? I could rewrite that movie without changing or adding any extra footage and make it better. Alright, so I’ll give you two scenes. For example, scene number one, you’ve got Will Smith, who’s a little too egotistical, the opening scene. He has some horrible idea where he is got a blackmail. The guy that he’s being paid to assassinate. This guy stores to the last minute and basically extorts him and then kills the guy and he’s like the hero, what are you doing? Okay, that’s scene number one, right? Then you’ve got scene number two where through the movie he shows you that he’s a brilliant shot.

(01:45:26)
He proves that the walker, everything, the whole bit Walker gets pissed off with Harlequin, she’s getting away. She goes shoot him. And he goes, oh, okay, bang, I missed. And nothing happens. Now they are incredibly dumb sequences. A, it goes against what they’ve showed you, and B, they make him sound like a negative guy. So you want to wake Mil Smith an appealing character. Okay, let’s take the first seat. We’ve got him on the rooftop, we don’t change the footage. Instead of showing him about to kill the guy, you show the sequence where his little girl is happy that he’s a nice guy. Then he rings up the guy who’s hired and says, I can’t do this right? I’m not going to do it. Sorry, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be a horrible person. He threatens his daughter. So then he goes, shit, I’ll have to do it.

(01:46:27)
And then he does his complicated shot, same footage, same result. But now you’ve got sick of this guy he’s trying to reform, but he was stuck much better character development. Then you’ve got the shot with Harlequin Harlequins darling from the ladder on the helicopter. He shoots her and misses apart from being totally unbelievably unrealistic based on what he’s done, Waller doesn’t blow his head off. So what should he do? Well, he has to try and shoot or he is got to get his head blown off. Well, obviously he doesn’t, but that’s what should have happened. So what he does is he shoots her, he doesn’t kill her, he raz her on the forehead just enough to make a dizzy unconscious because she falls down onto the roof. That scene’s already been filled. It looks like he shot her and she’s dead. You go away and then you see her get up with a wound, right?

(01:47:18)
Didn’t change anything and both things achieve the same result that you want to get as opposed to what just happened. And why do you do that? And that’s the way I tend to end up looking at stuff. It’s kind of bad because I self-correct everything and it’s like, that would be a much better movie if you did the whole thing. You don’t have to change anything. It’s like who the hell wrote this thing you’ve said, as I to say to people, I don’t care what you do in your book, I don’t care what rules you have in your universe, I don’t care whether magic is common, I don’t care what science you have. All I care about is you make it consistent. It works the same way all the way through. So there’s a logic because that’s what people relate to. You can believe in magic as long as it operates the same all the time. As soon as you change it, people are going, what happened? And you lose it. So that’s another reason why I read or experience other stuff. It’s look, yeah, okay, it might influence me. I doubt it will. The only way it influences me is I would’ve done it better.

(01:48:33)
I don’t have an ego.

Leigh Chalker (01:48:35):
You say you don’t.

Joseph Italiano (01:48:37):
It’s not an ego at all. It’s not an ego, it’s just me.

Leigh Chalker (01:48:41):
It’s just true.

Joseph Italiano (01:48:45):
There’s so many things that are like that where if you had a competent rider, it wouldn’t be a problem. And I don’t understand how they get, I mean it’s like Deadpool Wolverine was brilliant, right? Nothing wrong with it. Well written, very clever. Well done. Hats off. No problem. Why don’t you get people that can write like that? Why do you hide a people that can’t even be consistent in their own story?

Leigh Chalker (01:49:14):
Because

Joseph Italiano (01:49:14):
That’s where you lose it. If you can’t keep the story together, how is the consumer going to do it? What was that question that someone asked me before that I now have forgotten? Memoir.

(01:49:25)
Okay, I’m not writing a memoir. Okay. What I’m actually writing working title is something along the lines of Australian comic books, the rarest English language comic books in the world and related fandom in industry. So it’s about Australian history of comic books, how it relates to the comic industry overall, the way the comic industry developed here, including fandom, conventions and all sorts of interesting stories and stuff from various people. The book was not originally my idea. The book came about by accident. I was speaking to Grant Adley from Halo because obviously we set stuff up and we chat and as you may have gathered, I talk a lot too, as does Grant. And we were just gas bagging about different things and we’re gas bagging about history and stuff. And Australian comic included, and he stopped me for a minute and said, you should write a book. And I went, don’t wait. It’s too much work could be bothered. And he goes, but you know all this stuff because you experienced it firsthand. When you are gone, it’s gone. And I went, you bastard there, you made me feel guilty. And that’s basically what it is. Even though I didn’t get a hundred percent information, there’s a lot of information that I have which hasn’t been recorded, which I know is true because I got it firsthand from these creators and stuff.

(01:51:02)
So I’m putting that together. The difference is it’s not just old stuff, it’s also going up past effectively the sixties. A lot of people think that Australian comics died in the sixties. They didn’t. They just morphed. So panel by panel, which you probably know from John Ryan, he did a good job, but it only went to a certain point. So I’m trying to cover from before what he did to literally up to a few years ago in brief. And I can’t do it in detail because it would literally be an encyclopaedia. You’d be surprised how much history we have and a lot of our history overlaps. So in doing all this stuff, it’s not just history of comics. There’s significant overlap in things that happened in both in literature and in radio and in movies, it all interlinks and you’ve got a lot of creative people involved with it as well, the same thing.

(01:52:00)
And then on top of that, I’m trying to do kind of an index of major stuff so people have some idea of what exists and how it works. The Australian comic industry was very weird. If anyone’s collected anything, you’ll find titles that don’t make sense. It’s like, well, how come this is this size and now it’s this size and who published this and what’s the date? And it gives you information about that, how to work out what stuff is, how to work out dates, and who the major publishers were and why they did what they did. And they did some weird things. And despite the fact these things were done for a particular reason, they still do ’em, but the reason’s not like they still do it. So it covers a very broad range of things. I’ve actually had to cut stuff out to try and not give myself a 20 year job. But the problem I have at the moment is I’ve written about probably 80% plus, and the last few things seem to be very slow, partly because I’m snow under at work, and partly because I’ve reached the point where I need to talk to, I suppose what you’d call the modern era creators. And I don’t want to print anything that I don’t believe is true. So what I’m doing is I’m trying to make it as accurate as possible. If I put it in the book, I think it’s right. I could be wrong but unlikely.

Leigh Chalker (01:53:32):
Well, okay,

Joseph Italiano (01:53:38):
So it’s literally a case of just chased up the last half a dozen odd people and fine tuning it. It also covers things like grading and the difference between grades for Australian product and American product because they are different. You’ve got different criteria. I mean, the most obvious one is the stables have to be clean and no rust. It’s like what happens when a topic is glued and there’s no staples, it doesn’t even fit the criteria. You’ve also got the same sort of errors, gold age, silver age, et cetera here. And there are significant dates that match up. There’s a lot of, as I say, overlap and similarities. So because it covers a broad area and because it’s got indexes and stuff as well, it gets messy. And unfortunately I’ve had to cherry pick, which basically means I’ve picked out stuff that either I like or I think is interesting. There’s a lot of interesting history. Some of it’s known, some of it’s unknown. And yeah, it’s sort of a mixed bag. I dunno how it’s going to work out in the end, but we’re getting there. So no, it’s not an autobiography. The reason there is a biography about me in it is because I’m not only writing about history. I’m actually part of it.

Leigh Chalker (01:54:57):
Well, you are. Yeah. From what you’ve said today, big

Joseph Italiano (01:54:59):
Part of it. Yeah, that’s why I’m sort of in it. I mean, apart from what I’ve already said, I’ve done some other things like a fact that I haven’t bothered to mention lately either is you all remember when Advanced Comics came out or the equivalent of Diamond previews? That was a concept I created. It wasn’t an American concept. And the reason Diamond previews came out two months after Advanced Comics was because I was doing this for my catalogues and I said to myself, look, this is a lot of work and the solicitations we get from America are shit. Why don’t I just get them to do it? So I literally contacted capital and said, why don’t you do this? This is a good idea. And I know it’s a good idea because not only did they do it immediately, but when I went to the Capital Convention, the first thing that happened when I went in the door and said, I’m Joe. They said, oh shit, come out to the boardroom. And they dragged me up to the boardroom with pretty much everyone, that’s anyone, and just sat there and grilled me.

Leigh Chalker (01:56:04):
What did they grill you on?

Joseph Italiano (01:56:07):
What other ideas do you have? What else can you tell us? I mean, it didn’t really sink in at the time because to me it was just a very logical thing to do. There was a thing called the comic reader, which you may be aware of, which was like a news magazine. There was comic buyers guide and they all did similar things, which was, oh yeah, this comic is coming out by blah, blah, blah, blah with this subplot. And all I was doing was just colliding the information to send out to my customers so it would increase sales. It was just, to me it wasn’t anything brilliant. It was just this helps. And then I didn’t want to do it myself. So I got them to do it. And obviously it’s a good idea because it revolutionised the industry.

(01:56:53)
But I won’t go into how many things I think are just common and basic and everyone thinks they’re brilliant. It’s very strange. Some people think I might have Asperger’s because I miss things that are right in front of me, which might be true, I don’t know. But I think it’s more a trait of, as I was saying before, I tend to retain things that I think, sorry, my subconscious things is important to me and everything else gets flushed. Like I am hopeless with names. I’ll remember faces and it’ll take me, I remember a name, I’ll remember the person and if sub significant event happened, I’ll remember it. But if it’s not something that I need or my brain thinks it’s important, it goes. Which is a common thing for most guys when it comes to things like weed anniversaries and stuff. It’s not that you don’t care. It’s like you don’t need that information to exist so you don’t file it.

Leigh Chalker (01:57:56):
Joe, I think that

Joseph Italiano (01:57:59):
I’m going to get shot by my wife.

Leigh Chalker (01:58:01):
I don’t think there’s probably some ladies out there that would be disagreeing with you then.

Joseph Italiano (01:58:07):
I’m not saying I’m right, right? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should do it. I’m saying that’s the reason why we don’t remember. It’s not because we don’t care. It’s subconscious too. You’ve got to bear reminded. It’s subconscious. That’s why. I’ll give you a good example of subconscious. This actually happened to me about a year or two in the store. I’m terrible with names. Anyway, we have a customer who came in, he came in all the time and he said, I want to pick up my stuff. I recognised the face could not pick his name up for life nor death. And I’d go, what’s your name? And he’d give me his name and this what happened a lot. And he got really pissed off at me one time. I didn’t remember his name. And obviously I’m going, shit, I’m going to lose his customer because I’ve forgotten his name and I don’t know why I can’t remember it.

(01:59:04)
And then I just started spouting this information. It wasn’t even conscious. And it basically came out to this effect, which was, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name because you have an American accent and your last name is more. And I keep thinking that’s Scottish and it doesn’t relate to me. Now I’m not consciously thinking this. It’s just spewing out. And he goes, oh yeah, I do come from Scottish background, blah, blah. And the whole thing just reversed. Now, none of that was conscious. I didn’t suddenly work out. That’s what I should be saying. But that’s what was in my head. This is why my brain didn’t remember it, because I’ve got American accent, Scottish name and I couldn’t put the two together because your subconscious doesn’t work the same as your conscious mind. Your subconscious operates on primarial instincts. It operates on emotions and basic things. So languages irrelevant. It doesn’t understand language anyway.

Leigh Chalker (02:00:04):
It’s like just little identifiers that you have in certain things probably work in your sub. Yeah, it

Joseph Italiano (02:00:09):
Just triggered, yeah. But as I said, the weirdest thing about it was I was saying it without even realising what I was saying. It just came out. I think it was like a panic with refund.

Leigh Chalker (02:00:26):
It’s just an automatic self-defense mechanism.

Joseph Italiano (02:00:30):
Well, it’s like fight or flight, right? In certain situations you don’t think, you literally don’t think your subconscious mind takes over and says, do this. And you’re going, shit, what did I just do? And it was that sort of situation. It’s not a conscious thing, but your subconscious brain does actually take over.

Leigh Chalker (02:00:50):
Yeah. Well that’s also,

Joseph Italiano (02:00:51):
We’re getting pretty deep now, aren’t we?

Leigh Chalker (02:00:53):
No. I can go deep too. I study all this sort of stuff and partake in it. But I would say that that’s also like when you get into the zone, man, you didn’t have a choice. You just took over. Yeah.

Joseph Italiano (02:01:08):
Yeah. Same thing. When you get into the zone, everything just clicks in and all this information you’ve stored up, not your wife’s birthday, whatever just flows out.

Leigh Chalker (02:01:20):
Yeah, you should put a posty note up tomorrow. Joe,

Joseph Italiano (02:01:26):
Hear funny. My ex-wife and my current wife both have the same day as their birthday. They’re just different months. Do you know how hard that makes it?

Leigh Chalker (02:01:39):
Yeah, I can understand

Joseph Italiano (02:01:40):
That. I can remember the date really easily, but I really have to think about the month. And you don’t want to get that wrong.

Leigh Chalker (02:01:49):
Well, no. No one does not want to get that wrong. It’s sensitive areas, those things, mate. Luckily I’m not married and luckily I don’t have to worry about those sorts of dates and times and things. So I’m

Joseph Italiano (02:02:03):
Oh, keep the question coming guys. I’m happy to answer anything you want to know.

Leigh Chalker (02:02:06):
Remember my own, so with your memoir as Danny, not a memoir. I know it’s not a memoir now Ben Rams. Here you go. Joe, do you remember the kid that keeps coming in to buy Hellboy and Spawn comics? Because that you

Joseph Italiano (02:02:21):
Want a diplomatic answer specifically? No. And I’ll tell you why. When we were running the conventions, we’d get six, 700 people coming. Everyone knew who I was. Everyone would say hello and good day, whatever. And it just became a blur. I’d probably remember you if I saw you. But as I said, there’s just so much information. If I remembered every name and every face, I probably wouldn’t have memory for anything else. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the customers or whatever. I mean, okay, funny story, let’s diverge again. When I went to primary school in grade one, I met my best friend. We went through all primary school together. He was the only friend I kept from primary school in high school. Even though I went to different schools and we’ve stayed friends for a long, long time. I’d known him for over 20 years at this point.

(02:03:24)
This happened. And back in the good old days with doll phones, I rang up his home number to talk to him, right? Phone numbers I can remember. For some strange reason, I rang up and his mum answered the phone. And of course the obvious thing to say was, could you get so-and-So, and my brain went, shit, what’s his name? I had literally forgotten his name right? Over 20 years. And I’m sort of chit-chatting, making social chit chat with his mum because I can’t remember his name. And then we talked for a few minutes. He goes, oh, do you want to talk to Dale now? Yeah,

Leigh Chalker (02:04:03):
That’s him

Joseph Italiano (02:04:06):
Right now. You tell me in what logical sense should I have forgotten this guy’s name? It doesn’t make any sense. Best friend for 20 years, not only did we see each other at school, but we’d do play dates and stuff. It’s like, but for some reason it just went, I got no idea why I, so I figure if I ever get this guy’s name for 20 years, I don’t think anyone could be offended if I get their name.

Leigh Chalker (02:04:31):
Yeah, that happens sometimes if I meet people and I don’t remember their names, I just call ’em mate. So until it comes to me, that’s my go-to,

Joseph Italiano (02:04:43):
Yeah. Well, okay, if I call your mate for the entire day, then you know why?

Leigh Chalker (02:04:47):
Then you’ll know why. So everyone’s your mate, so it’s good.

Joseph Italiano (02:04:54):
What’s in a name? A rose by another name would smell a sweet, but it wouldn’t have thought.

Leigh Chalker (02:04:59):
I see myself as just a big old sack of skin and bone man with a big soul in it. I was just identified as lead by my parents.

Joseph Italiano (02:05:08):
Oh yeah. We didn’t be our own name.

Leigh Chalker (02:05:10):
Yeah, that’s right. Hey, now I’m not going to call it what Danny called it, but that book sounds pretty important, man. I like the fact that the way you’re talking about how you’re collating all the facts and that sort of thing, you’re doing that a lot with everything. It looks like how you put the book together is also how you put everything together, man, by just an idea. All pieces that you have at your school, building the business, learning along the way. You’re just sort of being able to bring everything together. Man, that’s a good quality to have. An adaptability it seems that you’ve expressed tonight.

Joseph Italiano (02:05:49):
Well, I suppose the weird thing is I said my upbringing was very weird. I wasn’t aware that fail was even an option. I know it sounds kind of dumb. So, okay, another story. Here’s another still story. When we were moving from 76 Chapel Street to Bayswater, which was 13 years ago, we had a lot of stuff and we knew we needed to get a forklift and to have pallets stacking and stuff. And I went, oh, okay, well, I better go get a forklift licence. All right. So I rang up, got the paperwork, got a manual that’s so big, you had to learn all this stuff and then you could go sit this exam. I had never driven a fork. So we got up early in the morning, went to a place in Dandenong, and there was about 25 to 35 odd people that were sitting down at the desk and they said, okay, stage one is the technical part. It’s effectively a test. You’ve got to answer all these questions. And they’re all just technical questions about operating the fork and what all the bits did and all sort of stuff. I think they gave us, I dunno, an hour and a half, whatever I finished well before that obviously, I thought, oh yeah, pretty straightforward, right? Went out and they said, okay, then we’ll have lunch and then we’ll come back. So we had lunch, everyone came back out of the entire group. There were three of us that passed, and I went, what?

(02:07:33)
Now this thing at the time was like 500 bucks just to sit for it. So he goes, okay, you three come with me. So we went downstairs to a pseudo, it was a warehouse, but everything there was empty containers on pallets. Gave us a fork each and, sorry, I didn’t do that first. What they’d said was, okay, we’re going to give you a few more questions. I’m going to make it quick because you guys passed so you can answer it as a group. So he asked a bunch of questions. The first bunch were all complicated, which I just sp it off, and then he answered, asked some other stuff and copied to shut up basically. And then we all passed that bit. Then we got into a fork and he split us up. I was on one side by myself and the other two on the other side.

(02:08:19)
And he goes to me, okay, so there’s all these red pellets over there and blue pellets there. I want you to make a red steak and a blue stack, blah, blah, blah. Alright, so I’ve got in the fork. I never joined a fork before. It’s like, okay, so I got into a fork. This is like a two and a half tonne fork, which in case you know what a fork is, a forklift. It’s basically a go-kart that can drive through brick walls. So I know how to drive. So that wasn’t too bad. And I start driving the fork around. So I was doing this, you had to do driving backwards through pseudo mat up with tyres and chicanes, and a lot of it’s just visual coordination. So I’m doing this and then I finish, I go, oh, I’ve done it already. I’ve done it. What’s next?

(02:09:05)
He goes, oh, you’ve done it already. Oh, okay, we’ll do this then. And I kept finishing early, which was pretty cool, and manoeuvring the fork and stuff. As I said, it’s like driving. It’s just a go-kart type of handling. Okay, so while this is going on, I can hear stuff from the other side and there’s a guy on the other side in the middle. So there’s pallet racket in the middle, so two rows, and then there’s pad on the other side. So the forks are in the middle here with the pallet racket in the middle. This guy’s putting pallets in and they’re sticking out and they’re coming through on my side and they’re obviously not quite right, which was a bit annoying.

(02:09:50)
And then you hear this all body scream, and this guy, this adult is bawling his eyes out, he’s crying his heart out. What the, and the instructor comes over, runs over to me and he goes, you’re going to have to help me. I’m going, what? And he goes up there. So what’s happened is the guy has put a fork pallet with I think three or four barrels. The barrels are empty, but there’s still big barrels. This is on the third level. So it’s about, I don’t know, three metres high. And the barrels are precariously, teetering and balance and about to fall off. And he goes, I want you to help me fix it to put ’em back on.

(02:10:33)
All right? So we’re both operating forks from different side and we’re manoeuvring to push these things together, push the barrels on so they don’t fall up and put the pallet back around to fix it. Okay? And I’m going, I’m here doing a test. Why the am I doing this stuff stuff? Anyway, that got resolved at finish. This poor guy had failed his test. I presume even if he didn’t pay for the, because that’s the other thing too. A lot of these people were sent by the, what’s it called? The government employment agencies. So they pay the money for them to set this exam. There’s a lot of money. I dunno if he was sent by them or not, but he obviously was very depressed and failed. So out of all that, two of us got through and the instructor said, oh, do you need a job? I can recommend you somewhere. I said, no thanks, but that’s cool. And I was sort of amazed that as I said, I’m sitting here doing an exam, I’m never doing a fork and I’m the one that’s helping to put it back up. But as I said to me, it’s like you read the information, it tells you what you need to know. Driving the fork is just driving any other vehicle. You’ve just got to be more careful because it weighs a tonne.

(02:11:56)
Why is it so hard to do? It never occurred to me that I could go here and fail. Why would you fail? And that seems to be the problem. I think there’s just so many people that are so convinced that they can fail, which again, as I said before, it doesn’t matter. No one gets it right first time. Well, maybe me occasionally, no one gets it right first time. And even if you do right, it’s not wrong. Again, I’ll diverge one last time. There’s a great reference from a scientist who was doing some experiment and he was trying to prove something and he did this thing 500 times and none of them worked. And another scientist came up to him and said, man, you are useless. You have done this 500 times and you’ve failed every single time. And the reply was, no, I haven’t. I have conclusively proved 500 ways that this won’t work.

Leigh Chalker (02:13:01):
Yeah, perspective, man. That’s how it is, man. Perspective is just how you want to shape your reality, I guess. Well,

Joseph Italiano (02:13:11):
It’s a half past half full thing, right? There’s too much emphasis placed on getting it right the first time being perfect. It’s like everyone’s different. I mean, one of my friends, his wife was absolutely terrified that there was something wrong with their daughter because she wasn’t meeting the norm. She hadn’t developed a certain level at eight, six months or whatever. And I’m going, what are you worried about? You realise every single person is different. The average is not the norm. The average is where most people fit in. Everyone is different. If she takes six months to walk or five years to walk, it doesn’t matter as long as she learns to walk. And I mean even people like Einstein was slow. I think it took three when you started walking. Everyone has been pigeonholed and it’s wrong. Every single person on this planet is unique. Every single person on this planet is more than unique because there’ll never be another one like you. And everyone is special in some way. Not that I know what every way is. As I was saying to someone else, the probability of being born, do you know what the probability of being born is? That’s a great thing.

Leigh Chalker (02:14:36):
One in 10 billion or something to that effect, man, it’s very improbable. So therefore typically proven

Joseph Italiano (02:14:42):
The probability of being born, this is before abortion, bear in mind just to get out alive is the equivalent of 2 million people rolling a million sided dice and getting the same number. That’s the chance of you, specifically individual being born. Obviously with the number of million born, you’re going to get people, but each individual is that rare. And obviously everyone has something to contribute.

Leigh Chalker (02:15:15):
I agree. I agree mate. And

Joseph Italiano (02:15:18):
People keep thinking I’m nobody.

Leigh Chalker (02:15:21):
I believe that everyone is somebody. I love everyone man. In fact, I love that everyone is so unique. That’s why I don’t believe that people should have to suffer indignities or be told that their value is less than anyone else’s. I think everyone is beautiful in their own way, man. Absolutely. Whether it’s, I understand the scientific description and all of that, but no, I firmly believe, man, what you’re suggesting, it’s just life, man. As we begin to wind down our conversation this evening, which I have most enjoyed, you are a unique man, which is good.

Joseph Italiano (02:16:14):
I’m getting way too deep. I know.

Leigh Chalker (02:16:16):
No, you’re not. No, no, man, I can go deep. Don’t worry about that. I enjoy existential conversations, man, because it’s a path that I’m travelling, the depth and things like that. So that’s why I can agree with you on a lot of things here tonight about the uniqueness of people and that people, we need to look after our brothers and sisters. I say that at the end of every show, man. What would you say? As we wind down our show, mate, we come to the, I guess we’ve covered the whys you do it, the why you do it, the how you’ve done it, all of those sorts of things. But

Joseph Italiano (02:16:59):
I like it. I’m a sucker.

Leigh Chalker (02:17:01):
Yeah, yeah. I can tell that your bubble and you’ve got lots of stories and I want to read that book of yours too now. And I want to get on some of this history here and read more about what we’re women talking about. What if you were at alternate worlds and Little Joe came in, not that you’d remember little Joe because you may not remember him. So we’ll call him mate, and little mate comes in and he says, how do I get to where you are now? Beg Joe, what would you say to little mate? What would your advice say?

Joseph Italiano (02:17:43):
Don’t give up. Don’t give up is the easiest answer. As I said, never surrender, never give up. Giving up is what you do when you die. There’s another little additive I like to say, particularly now I’ve gotten older, and that is you find a lot of older people will complain about, oh, I’ve got this issue in my heart and this issue in my leg. And people think they’re just whinging and they’re not. Do you know what that actually is? That is them giving you their life battle scars. I have had this, I’ve survived. I had this and I’m still going. And as long as you’re still going, this can still do stuff, right? It’s when you give up is when you’re dead. And as I like to say, as long as you can complain about it, you’re doing well. Because when you can’t complain about it, that’s it.

Leigh Chalker (02:18:47):
You’re back one with

Joseph Italiano (02:18:51):
Or with whatever. Yeah. Does anybody else have any final questions before Lee wants to go home and say, my God, I need a cup of tea now.

Leigh Chalker (02:19:03):
Anyone? Does anyone have any final questions for Joe? Sp come for the comics, stay for the stay for

Joseph Italiano (02:19:10):
The,

Leigh Chalker (02:19:11):
You

Joseph Italiano (02:19:11):
Want me to tell you that story too? Do you?

Leigh Chalker (02:19:15):
One last one for the Road, Jake

Joseph Italiano (02:19:17):
Story. Okay,

Leigh Chalker (02:19:19):
Come.

Joseph Italiano (02:19:22):
This was a couple of years back, we had a family come in with a young boy and he’d never been to a comic shop. And I was driving the fork at the time and he’s going around going, oh wow, comic shop. And I got off the fork and said, yeah, look, this is a real comic shop. If you don’t have a fork, it’s not a comic shop. He goes, yeah. And then I thought, shit, I’ve probably ruling this kid because he’s going to go to every other comic shop and there’s no forklift. And you say it’s not a real comic shop

Leigh Chalker (02:19:52):
Down road told you need a forklift, you. Exactly. Yeah. Funny. Hey man, where can anyone that’s travelling down to Melbourne or new to Melbourne or wants to touch base with you, come into the shop and dunno where you are, where are you man? What’s your address and how can I get you your websites, all those contact details?

Joseph Italiano (02:20:13):
Okay, easy. So the address is Unit 11, number 13 Melbourne Street in Bayswater, that’s Eastern suburbs. We’re about 40 minutes east of the city where two train stations out of Ringwood. The website is alternate worlds.com au. We also have a Facebook page where we post news and information all the time. Phone number is oh three nine seven three eight two six two. Email is a world, it’s a WO rld at luth, LABY, RT H net au. And you can contact us that way. You can look us up on Google, it’ll tell you anyway. This may come as a shock, but I’m happy to chat to people and you can come in and see our stuff. We’re a little bit different as far as the comic shop is concerned as well, because we haven’t got that far. We only went to about the nineties. Gee, about to do part two, I suppose. We’ll,

(02:21:15)
So the difference between us and most other comic shops is that we’re more of a traditional comic shop. A lot of the comic shops are in the city or CBD, which means you need a high turnover, which means they’ve become a bit more like, what do you call ’em? The department stores. It’s hot this week, have a lot, then that’s it. Whereas we actually moved out of inner Melbourne specifically to warehouses. We’ve got two now just so we could do what we do. We have something like 600,000 back issue comics, which is American, British and Australian. We have the largest range of trade US trades and manga in the country. And we do a whole bunch of other collectibles including role playing games, cards, toys, DVDs, whatever, magazines I can’t even remember. ’em all pops a whole bit. One of the novel things about us is we’re a comic shop, but our range of role playing games and games is more than your standard game shop

(02:22:19)
Just because we have so much stuff. And part of it is because we’re collected, so we don’t want to want to get rid of it. We liquidate and we have a website where most of this stuff is on it, and if it’s within the last 15 years and we’ve processed originally, we’ll have pictures. We were quite early with developing a website, but when we first developed it, the idea of having pictures where it didn’t occur to us, it didn’t exist. So it was all text-based. So we’ve got a big job getting pictures for everything we have. We’ve probably got about three pallets of comics we haven’t processed. We’ve got a pallet of trading cards we haven’t processed and a pallet of poetry haven’t processed. And there’s some stuff that people give their it for. We just had time to get to it. We’ve been constantly buying back issues. One of the few stores that still buys old comics, again, the whole range, Canberra, uk, British, Australian, and yeah, we’ve got a lot of collectibles I suppose better put it. Or someone else might say junk.

Leigh Chalker (02:23:29):
No, there’s no junk there, man. It’s all treasure. Nothing better than those old treasure troves where you walk in there and you see the back issues and you’re chasing your favourite things and all that, man. So it’s like, it’s good. I’m glad you’re keeping that vibe alive, man. I miss those things from when I was a kid and I used to walk into those places and be full of magic and stuff, but alternate worlds. There you go. And it really is alternate worlds, isn’t it? Because you are, you’re all shop mate in terms of what you sell in the place and the variety of things, which you’ve discussed with us this evening in a minute amount because I suggest and have an idea, Joseph, that you have a lot more to tell us and a lot more stories to divulge.

Joseph Italiano (02:24:17):
But if I keep coming on here, I can’t finish the book and put it in there. Well

Leigh Chalker (02:24:23):
Time. We can always at some point in the future, mate, when the book’s ready to rock and roll, you can come on and have a gas bag again then. So Danny Nolan, best comics shop in Bayswater. There you go, mate. Danny know he loves you, man. He’s always there. KJB. Such a great evening fellas. Thank you for watching KJB. Everyone, Nick May well played, gentlemen. Thank you sir. Thank you for your support. Beautiful comic book too, Nick. Lovely. I’ll talk to you more about that later. Joseph at Italiano, thank you very much for joining the Chinwag family tonight. We will have a part two at some point in the future when you get ready to rock and roll with that book, man, come back on and tell us some more stories and we’ll get into it and find out how your world is travelling and yeah man, I’ve enjoyed tonight. I’m very grateful for the time, man. Humbled that you’re here because you are a popular figure. You’ve been doing this for a long, long time, man. Flying the flag for comic books, collectors, creators, international, local, all those sorts of things, man. And you’ve only touched on your history, which is deep man, and you’ve got more to tell in that book. I wish you every success with the book and all success in the future, man. I look forward to seeing you again.

Joseph Italiano (02:25:47):
Oh, thanks very much. Look, it’s been great talking to you. And as far as success for the book is concerned, if I publish it, that’s my success.

Leigh Chalker (02:25:54):
Yeah, that’s lovely. I just

Joseph Italiano (02:25:55):
Want to get it out now.

Leigh Chalker (02:25:57):
Yeah, yeah. Well it’s worked hard at it, man, and you’ve got important history to tell, mate. It’s Australian comic books. It’s a beautiful thing, man. It is a lot more detailed topic than what people recognise.

Joseph Italiano (02:26:11):
It is very unique too. The way the industry developed and what happened here is unique. There are similarities with some other countries in some of the areas of the books, but it’s quite different because of the insulated environment we had. And yeah, again, without going into a big spiel, I can’t really say anything. It’s too long.

Leigh Chalker (02:26:37):
Yeah, yeah. No, I’ll save it for next time and we’ll get it there. You’re coming back, man. You’re coming back, so don’t stress.

Joseph Italiano (02:26:43):
I’d be happy to,

Leigh Chalker (02:26:44):
You got the green light all right from me, so it’s like you’re welcome back at any stage. Alright, well mate, just hang around at the end of the show and we’ll just touch base and just say good day and goodbyes and all that sort of thing. And look, I’d just like to thank everyone for always supporting Comic X and Chinwag. Thank you to the viewers that so regularly watch. I greatly appreciate it. I appreciate your time, all the effort and support that you put into the X Community and the Australian Comic Books community. If you live in Melbourne, go and check out Ultimate World you’ve met Joe. Go and say Good day to Joe. Call him mate, call him Big Joe, little Joe, any sort of Joe. Just pop in and say good day and have a look at some comic books. On a serious note, everyone knows that myself and Ciz at Comex are big advocates of mental health.

(02:27:36)
So without, I just want you just to again, look after your brothers and your sisters because some people need support. Some people feel alone. Just reach out, send someone a text, let ’em know they’re not alone. You know what I mean? Walk past someone on the street, give ’em a smile. You never know. It might change their day. Doesn’t hurt to be kind, man. Doesn’t cost you anything either. So look, I’d like to thank everyone again for watching tonight’s show. Like subscribe and share the channel. Let’s get us up to 500 subscribers. Go and check out the Comex Shop. There’s heaps of people in there, so go and support you community. Lets the tree grow, alright? Community is unity and Chinwag is and always will be made with love. See you next week. Thank you. Bye.

Voice Over (02:28:37):
This show is sponsored by the Comics Shop. Check out cover to comics shop to pick up a variety of Australian comics from multiple creators and publishers. All for one flat postage rate. We hope you enjoyed the show.