Rylend: 0:00

People get this immediately. They're in on this immediately. They're excited for this immediately. So that is a blessing, but it can also be a curse because when you're dealing with a beloved character, you better treat it right. You better do it with love and respect. You better do it justice because Evel Knievel fans are very passionate. And if you do it wrong, if you do him wrong, if you do not respect the history, they're going to let you know about it.

Heather: 0:27

Evel Knievel inspired millions of us with his courage and perseverance. We're building a museum so you can relive those memories and be reinvigorated with that spirit of bravery.

Evel Knievel: 0:39

My name is Evel Knievel. I'm a professional daredevil. Along the way, we meet people involved in the life, the times, and the legacy of the King of daredevils. Here with their stories is your host, Joe Friday.

Joe P: 0:56

Hey, howdy. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming along. I want to start by thanking our last guest, which was Bill Scott, creator of the iconic Number One branding in action sports and motorsport. It's a really great episode, so look it up. If you haven't seen it. Right now, I'm going to introduce you to Rachel and Rylend. They are the creators of a new Evel Knievel comic book. Rylend, you happen to be wearing the number one logo that I was just referencing. There you go.

Rylend: 1:30

Yeah, I'm representing today. Okay.

Joe P: 1:33

And Rachel, nice to see you again. Thank you. Last we met was at ComicCon.. Let me just say from the for inviting me to ComicCon. It was a dream come true. I grew up as a kid tracing John Byrne's X-Men number 137 And that's pretty much how I learned how to draw. I mean, I've been drawing since I was a kid, but then I spent my time through high school planning to be a comic book artist and getting scolded by the professional art teachers who really wanted me to reach and grow."If all you draw is comic books, that's all you'll ever be is a comic book artist."

Rylend: 2:15

Well,

Joe P: 2:16

You could do worse. Could do worse.

Rachel: 2:19

Yeah.

Joe P: 2:20

It was such, and then in my early adulthood when I could actually afford to go to Comic Con, I'd register, they have this lottery and then not win. It was surprising and it's like a dream that I never even dared to dream. Like why would I be going at the age of 55 years old to comic on? But, so thank you for inviting me.

Rylend: 2:42

Well, it was great to have you. It was great to have a representative of the Evel Knievel Museum when we were announcing debuting Evel Knievel comic book, the very first Evel Knievel comic book, a long overdue Evel Knievel comic book. it great to have your insight and your expertise and, it was good of you to, lend authenticity to the entire endeavor.

Joe P: 3:02

Yeah, it gave me something to do between the time that we're building a museum and moving everything because we've closed our Topeka location and we're moving to Las Vegas. So yeah, it was neat. It was cool to be able to talk about those memories, to talk about the legend, because all I get to talk about is concrete and electrical and conduit, and I don't even care about that stuff. It was a good reminder of why I even do this.

Rachel: 3:31

Yeah. But you have, you had some great stories and great insight and it was just like things that I had been researching for the last, I don't know, year or so since we got the license. We even started trying to get it. You were able to tell me new details about some of these stories just because you've not only heard them all, but you've been living and breathing this in a different way for much longer than myself or Rylend have.

Joe P: 4:05

Yeah, they're really great stories. They're certainly not my stories, but they're legendary and it's neat that you're picking that up. I mean, it's your story now. So Rylend and Rachel are the creators of the new Evel Knievel comic books, which will be launching today. How did you get started even, how did the idea of Evel Knievel even enter your head?

Rylend: 4:30

I wrote in Hollywood for a very long time. I wrote in Hollywood for, I don't know, 12 years before I ever wrote a comic book. Mostly big character driven action movies. Wrote for folks like JJ Abrams and Ridley Scott and John Wu and F. Gary Gray and you know, some big Hollywood action movies. They wouldn't, There was a lot of stuff they wouldn't let me do in Hollywood. You know, Hollywood more and more, you can almost kind of fit on a postage stamp what they will let you do in proper Hollywood. I grew up in the Sundance movement. I saw Pulp Fiction. I said, Hey, I want to do that, because people were doing challenging things, interesting things. They were pushing the limits of what the medium could be. I moved out to LA. I got my snooty film education at the American Film Institute Conservatory, which is where like David Lynch went and Darren Aronofsky. I'm all prepped up to tackle the world and tell these great stories. And then by the time I got spit out, Hollywood had stopped doing that. I'm writing in Hollywood, but you can basically make five different kinds of movies in Hollywood. They want them all written a certain way. I got very good at writing those movies. They bought my house, but I was left unfulfilled. Comics was sitting there always. I was a comics fan forever. And the beauty of comics was you can tell any kind of story any way you want to tell it. As long as it was good, you were going to find an audience for it. And that was very much what I found in comics. I wrote a couple of books. The first book was a kind of a political action thriller called Aberrant. And the second one was a book called Banjax, which was kind of a dark superhero noir. And those books were received really well, and they won a Ringo award which is comic book Oscars, comic book Golden Globes, whatever you want to call it. Banjax was nominated for four Ringo Awards, including best series. You write a couple of books like that and then you start to get some attention and people come to you and they say, Hey, what do you want to write? And everyone expects you to say, well, I have wanted to write Captain America since I was a kid. I want to write Superman more than anything and I'm going to murder someone to write Superman. And that just wasn't me. I love those books. My friends write those books, but I am not the guy to write those books. I turned down a lot of stuff. People would come to me and be like, Hey, do you want to write an arc on this? And I'd be like, eh, not really. It was no offense to those books or anything like that. Part of it was, I was so busy with my Hollywood stuff that I didn't really have the bandwidth. But if I'm not the guy, I'm not the guy. At some point, a really smart editor said, well, hey, what do you want to write? At some point, you're going to have to figure out what you want to write and so I sat down one day and I wrote down a list of characters that I would like to make comic books about. That would, actually, I would be all in on writing comic books about. It was an odd list in terms of how a normal comic book writer would make that list. Who's on it? H ere's the thing is we are still negotiating for certain licenses, but here's what they all had in common. Many of them had not been represented in comic books before. And the most important thing was that Evel Knievel was right at the top of the list. I could not believe that he had never been given the proper comic book treatment. Of course, there was this comic book years ago that was basically an Ideal Toys commercial. And we can talk about that later, but he had not had a proper comic book series. And that seemed crazy to me. I reached out to Kelly Knievel and turned out Kelly and I were fast friends. We were kindred spirits. We hit it off. After a lot of talking, a lot of going back and forth, I think he became confident that maybe it was a good idea and that I was the guy to do it. And started putting the team together

Joe P: 8:08

which included RE Nelson.

Rylend: 8:10

Yeah, yeah. My company is Half Evil Comics. Rachel is our executive editor and head of development, and so she has been brought on to shepherd the project.

Rachel: 8:18

Rylend and I met at Comic-Con one year, but I actually knew him before in a very strange way. So I worked in development for several years in Hollywood with a studio that, like smaller production companies and in a lot of times with individual directors where I'd help them try to find projects that fit their brand. I would end up reading just a bunch of scripts. There was a year of my life where I probably every day read about three scripts a day. And I got really good at being able to tell within the first, you know, five to fifteen pages whether or not this was going to be worth my time. And I read a one of Rylend's scripts back while I was doing that. We were introduced by a mutual friend and I kept, you know, Rylend is a weird name. It's a fake name. When you see it on a page, you don't quite forget it. And so I was just like, I think I've read one of your scripts. And he's like, there's no way you have, and I was like, yeah, I think I've read something. Turns out I did. I made him list a couple titles and had read a screenplay of his called

Rylend: 9:43

State of Consciousness. State of

Rachel: 9:45

Consciousness, thank you. He was like, there's no way you've read it. I recited the plot of his movie to him, even the twists. And it was one of the scripts that I liked a lot and that's why it had stuck with me. I have read hundreds of scripts, so for something to stick with me is It's rare. I was a fan of the writing before I met the writer and I then we started talking about story and what we liked, what we didn't like. He convinced me to look into comics because I was having a lot of the same problems he was having in the industry, where as a writer, as a creator, as a producer, there was what I wanted to make and what I was passionate about and what people were willing to pay me. And most of the time they didn't line up. I was doing a lot of work for projects that I just didn't care about. After the writer strike and after a bunch of other things that happened in Hollywood, I lost a job, lost not because I was fired, but just because there was no more work. And he asked if I wanted to come on board and I enthusiastically said yes.

Joe P: 11:08

Was the comic

Rylend: 11:08

books industry affected by that strike? Still is being affected by that strike. Good for us in some ways, not good for us in other ways. It used to be that there were five comic book companies and they were all run by 50-year-old white guys, and you had to go and get the permission of one of those 50-year-old white guys to do your comic book. A lot of gatekeeping and a lot of poor decision making and all that stuff. The comic book industry has changed radically, and part of it is because of the strike and COVID and now tariffs and all sorts of craziness that's happening. But crowdfunding Has become a really big deal, increasingly so. What it has done is it has given the creators the power. You no longer need permission to make your book. You can take it direct to market yourself. There's a huge and enthusiastic audience on Kickstarter, on Indiegogo, more every day. I would say that about 60% or more comic book business crowdfunding platforms now. It has empowered the creators. It is very hard to make money putting books in comic book shops as a creator, but if you go to Kickstarter and you make a good book and you have a good reputation, you can actually make the book you want to make. You don't have to answer to anybody. And so that is what has happened. Really what we're seeing now is we are seeing the birth of a lot of micro publishers. And that's what we're doing is I started out as an individual creator on Kickstarter and built a good reputation and made a couple of hits. People started looking to me almost as a tastemaker and so you start to grow and at some point you realize, oh, I'm not a creator anymore. This is a company and this is a larger enterprise. You start bringing on people like Rachel. David Avallone is a very prolific comic book writer and editor that we've brought on to do some work. We are in the process of kind of building out the team slowly but surely. We have a battalion of really talented artists who have won Eisners and Ringo Awards and Harvey Awards. It has really become this bigger thing. It is bigger than me and we started out publishing my books, but now we're publishing other people's books. We started acquiring licenses, which is a standard company move in the comic book business. Evel Knievel was the first license that we went after and the first license that we secured. We're going to do it in a way that I think people are going to love and we're going to do it in a way that no one else would've done it. I think that that is a very good thing. And so when you ask, well, did all this stuff affect the business? I think that's how it affected the business. Without those twists and those turns as hard as they were to eat for a lot of us, we don't end up here without that happening. This is where we are right now. There are things that are wrong with the business, but there's a lot that's right right now. This is one of the things that's right.

Joe P: 14:01

That's interesting that you both mentioned there are things that you could not do in Hollywood anymore. What are you doing with the comic books that you couldn't have done in Hollywood?

Rylend: 14:10

It was about experimental elements. When I was coming up in the Sundance movement, you had these directors that were just pushing the envelope, the Tarantinos playing with story structure and playing with unreliable narrators. My day job was telling A to B to C stories, regular vanilla ice cream stories. Right? There's a way you tell it. Tell it this way or else. When I got into comics, I wasn't interested in that. I made a promise to myself from the very beginning that I was never going to tell a straightforward A to B to C story. I was going to play with structure. I was going to play with time. I was going to play with unreliable and competing narrators. I was going to mess with experimental elements. Banjax, again, my dark superhero noir, is essentially a Batman and Robin story. It's a little more complicated than that, but let me boil it down to that. The idea is some heavy shit went down a long time ago. They're telling us the story. And so the odd issues are told from the Batman's point of view, and the even issues are told from the Robin's point of view. They're telling very different stories about the same events, and you have no idea what is actually true and what isn't. and you're never given the keys. You are left as the reader in the end to figure out, well, what actually happens? I don't know.

Joe P: 15:25

But all this sounds very familiar to me, by the way. Okay. I deal with a dozen unreliable narrators with every Knievel story.

Rachel: 15:33

Yeah,

Joe P: 15:34

I bet. Yeah.

Rylend: 15:36

Yeah. That is so interesting because I have digested so much Evel Knievel content over the years, but particularly in the last year or two. He is a folk hero. These are folk tales and everybody has their twist on it. And it was funny. It was something that you probably got the sense that I was doing it at San Diego because we spent a lot of time together at San Diego, and I would corner you and get a story out of you, and then I would corner Kelly and get the story out of him. Sometimes it would be stories that I had heard 10 or 12 times from different sources in a documentary. You read it in a book, whatever. And it's always slightly different. It is the same story to a degree, but the details are different. Evel broke Evel broke 30 bones. No, he broke 300 bones. No, he, No, he broke

Rachel: 16:25

435 bones. Yeah.

Rylend: 16:27

Yeah.

Rachel: 16:28

I've heard every number under the sun.

Rylend: 16:31

Yeah. And here's the thing is Evel himself, I have heard him tell the same story five or six times very differently. And here's him telling it when he is, you know, 30 and here's him telling it when he is 60. And those are very different. Where does the folklore begin and the reality end? It is such an interesting relationship. It's such an interesting dichotomy. A push and pull, a tug of war. I love it, and it has been one of the real joys of writing this character. Yeah.

Joe P: 17:05

How do you balance truth with myth and with this legend? Is your tale biographical or fictional or how are you dealing with this?

Rylend: 17:15

That is a really interesting question, and I think it is the principle question. When Rachel and I have to come together and debate and iron out scripts and stuff like that, this is the kind of thing we talk about, but you're getting to the heart of the story. This the interesting thing about this whole deal. In the beginning, the original pitch, when we started talking, it Evel and adventurer, right? Let's cast him almost as a superhero, as kind of the swinging dick hero that's going to roll in and solve a crime or whatever. This is an approach that has worked before. That has been used before, right? There was the television pilot starring Sam Elliot. And the idea there was basically, well, Evel is traveling around with his stunt show. He rolls into town. There's something going on in the town, some problem he has to fix, some bad guy he has to knock out, some attractive woman he has to bed. Then he does the jump that week. He packs back up, he rolls out of town and onto the next adventure. And Evel's big screen debut, Viva Knievel, had similar elements. Film starring Evel Knievel playing himself, in the Seventies, Not too different. Where again, Evel's traveling around with this stunt show, he gets duped into kind of going down into Mexico for some high profile jumps. There are drug dealers that want to use his caravan to get drugs into the country played by Leslie

Rachel: 18:38

Nielsen.

Rylend: 18:41

He has to knock out the bad guys. He has to bed the attractive reporter. From the beginning, the stories told have been this kind of blending of fact and fiction and all of that stuff. So the original pitch was, well, let's make him an adventurer. Let's do that. But, okay. What is Evel Knievel's Smokey and the Bandit? What is his No Country For Old Men? We're going to cast him. It's going to be him. He is a daredevil. He is rolled into town on a steel horse, but the town has been set upon by some evil. He's got to knock out the bad guys and bed the attractive woman and roll out of town. And that was really interesting. And so we started from there, but as we started to develop it and as we started to talk to fans about maybe real true Evel Knievel fans about what they would want, we got interesting feedback. And the idea was that fact is more interesting than fiction. Whatever we could make up about this guy was not nearly as interesting as what actually happened.. Or what people were accepting. That was such an interesting place well, we got all this great stuff. The idea that we wouldn't use this great stuff is crazy. It's just sitting here. It's just sitting here for us. We started reaching out to fans and talking to them and there are a lot of amazing Evel Knievel fans in the comic book community. If they were going to show up and they were going to show up enthusiastically, they wanted to see Caesars Palace. They wanted to see Snake River. They wanted to see this and this and this. Then we realized that a lot of comic book fans are younger. They know of Evel Knievel because who doesn't? Yeah. But, they also need to be educated, right?

Rachel: 20:27

Yeah. Yeah. That's basically where I was. I didn't grow up with Evel Knievel. I didn't grow up with Wild World of Sports. There were reruns going on when I was a kid. Every once in a while you would catch it, you would watch it, but it never, there wasn't this impact into my life about Evel Knievel. My real first introduction to Evel Knievel was the movie Hot Rod. I went and saw it with my dad and his best friend. And it was because they were super excited that there was someone else in the world that was excited about Evel Knievel. So they wanted to go watch this. Hey, it's that guy that you think is funny from SNL, let's go. This is like a bonding moment. They definitely loved all the craziness that he was doing because that was them. They're like, oh my God. We were the ones that were setting stuff on fire and doing all sorts of crazy things and trying to do a jump in our backyard and trying all the different stunts. That was my first introduction to Evel. But when Rylend told me about the property and that he was going after it and I started diving in, I went back to my dad and told him, Hey, yes, I'm going to be doing Evel. He goes off about how cool Evel was, the toys and that just like, it really gave me a sense of how important he was. My dad was one of the first people I told. My uncle was the next person I told. I have never seen my uncle so excited about something I've worked on until I told him about Evel Knievel and, man, he was just giving me stories. But I also realized how much I needed to be educated about him. To really understand how big of a deal he was. It was incredible as I could go to any of my uncles, any of family, friends, people like my godfather, and I'd be like, oh, I'm doing Evel Knievel. And they're like, oh my God.

Joe P: 22:37

I love that

Rachel: 22:39

You are doing Evel Knievel! Oh, that's the coolest thing. I worked on Star Trek. Yeah. No reaction. No. Evel Knievel. Oh yes. Yeah. I really paid attention to their enthusiasm, their passion, their love, what made them want to be Evel Knievel. As someone that wasn't around, that has been like one of my big things. As Rylend said, we need to educate the younger fans. And I'm going, okay, this is a moment where one generation gets to explain to the other generation, Hey, here's something. Let's share this thing that was important to me as a kid and let's share it with you and maybe we can find this really cool place in the middle to meet. It's super exciting. And now I get it. There's something about seeing how excited they all got about Evel Knievel was like, okay, this is how I feel about, you know, the Wicked musical. So I need to figure out, I need to find all of those things. I'm becoming a true fan.

Joe P: 23:50

Funny how that works. The construction manager at the Evel Knievel Museum in Las Vegas is about the same age as you. I don't think he was particularly enamored with Evel Knievel. It was just another construction job. Until he tells his dad. So it is just like your story, Rachel. Right. What"I'm so proud of you son." It is great to see the passion come out of people. It's great to see people just, their eyes light up when they hear the word.. Rylend: My experience was different ways where, again, I was born after Evel had stopped jumping. I did not see him jump live, quote unquote. But Wide World of Sports, the jumps were still being repeated constantly. I grew up in Detroit. My dad owned a bar and so I kind of grew up in the bar and on Saturdays Wide World of Sports was on. And these guys did not settle down for anything. They talked from the moment they walked in the bar to the moment they walked out. Never shut up about anything, arguing about this, arguing about that, and there was very little that would, even when a World Series game is on, and these guys aren't going to shut up. These guys in the bar didn't shut up for anything, but man, when Evel Knievel would come on the tv, you could hear a pin drop in the place. These guys were riveted and they were glued to the tv. And I am this young kid watching this, and I am just like, there has been a seismic shift in the universe and what happened? It's this lunatic is on the screen. I say that in the most loving way possible and with all the admiration. Here's the thing is like this was a bar full of working class ass kickers in Detroit and these guys, you had to earn respect. They didn't fear anything or anybody. But man, did they worship the ground that this guy walked on and just point to him and it was like, Hey kid, this is the guy. It's something that you have to realize is that if you want to be a man, here is the gold standard, right? Again, these were guys that just had massive balls, like just down to the man. There was the guy in the bar that you didn't mess with. It's like, oh, Gary will kill anybody. Don't mess with Gary. Yeah. N ot even Gary would mess with Evel Knievel. That was where we were. You're growing up and you just see that. Yeah. It's like, well, this guy is a living, breathing superhero. This guy can literally leap over tall buildings in a single bound and drives through brick walls. That just moved me to the core as a kid, and I carried it with me. It was a constant measure of a man as I grew up where it's like, anytime you were going to jump over anything and everybody wanted to jump over everything when you're a kid, it was like, oh, you're pulling an Evel Knievel? Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh. Oh, you went Evel Knievel, huh? Oh, he fell, but he was trying to be Evel Knievel. The guy's name just rang out. And very early on, I raced BMX bikes because of Evel Knievel. I was a sponsored racer. I was sponsored by Dyno. I raced competitively, and leapt over anything that I could because of Evel Knievel.

Rachel: 26:58

He greatly influenced my dad. My dad rode a motorcycle all my life because of Evel Knievel. He had two daughters but as a dad who wanted two daughters, loved his two daughters, but also wanted us to get back up the way Evel Knievel would get back up. We had some of the most interesting, I guess, training as a child. There's some interesting psychology with some of it. One of the things that my dad would do is he'd be like, okay girls, I'm going to teach you how to jump out of a moving vehicle. And you're like, okay, let's go. Oh, we thought it was the best, it was the most fun in the world. We had like, you know, who could jump out and if you could not cry. My dad had a phrase all the time. If you were a kid and you fell and you were like, "Dad!" And he'd be like, is it bleeding? And you're like, no. And it was like,

Rylend: 28:03

Why are

Rachel: 28:03

you crying?

Rylend: 28:04

back to the original question. We are blending the history. The history is very important. We are leading with the history. Longtime fans are going to show up. They're going to see the history. It's going to be a celebration of the history. It is going to be a loving tribute in the best way. New fans are going to show up. They're going to learn how and why this guy was the baddest motherfucker low down in any town. But we are also making him an adventurer. The idea is that he still has bad guys to knock out. He still has women to bed. He still has wrongs to right, but it's all happening against the background of the actual history. The first series is called The Last Gladiator. It is a four issue arc. It starts off at Caesars Palace and it ends at Snake River, and we hit a lot of key moments in his career. There is a primary antagonist through the whole thing. It is an outlaw motorcycle group called the Lamplighters. Evel has a long history of clashing with the outlaw motorcycle types. Don't need to name names, but the outlaw motorcycle types. Evel had a war of words with them and sometimes a physical war with them. W e're using a lot of that. We're bringing a lot of that to life, and we're having fun with it. Even when we are playing with the history, we are leaning into it. When he clashes with the bikers, it is a celebration of the actual history of him having this ideological feud with them.

Joe P: 29:26

That really did happen. He really was at war with the outlaw biker types. That's why he wore red, white, and blue was he didn't want to be associated with the black leather clad the hood, the drug marijuana smoking, the hoodlums

Rachel: 29:41

Those reefer crazed mad men. It's

Joe P: 29:45

The first series is four issues. What's your goal after that? Are you going to continue to explore Evel Knievel or move on to? As a

Rylend: 29:55

company, we are working on some other properties, but if the Knievel clan will allow us to make Evel Knievel books, we will do it for the rest of our lives. Such an interesting character. Such an adventurer. There are a thousand stories we can tell with this guy. The history is so rich, the character is so rich, so many ways you can take him, so many situations you can inject him into. What I'm noticing is that there are other creators that are excited about playing with these toys. And so we can facilitate that. We've already seen it with the artists. You talked about our dad's lighting up when we talk about we're writing Evel Knievel. It was the measure, yeah, when we were approaching artists about this and we were figuring out who we want to hire and who we don't. There are extremely talented artists. When you're dealing in comic books, you deal with foreign artists a lot, and they're wildly talented. They're amazing. But Evel Knievel is a decidedly American hero. Look no further than the red, white, and blue that you were talking about. And so if you go to an artist from, you know, Columbia or wherever, great artists, they'll draw the hell out of the book. But you go to them and you're like, Hey, we got the Evel Knievel property. What do you think about it? And they're like, you mean the daredevil? And they've already failed. They're out. There are artists that we went to and amazing artists. We went to Ray Anthony Height, who is one of the best artists I know and has been nominated for a bunch of awards and drew for Marvel and DC and anybody that was worth anything. And we went to Ray and just in passing, because I figured Ray was too busy because he's a pretty high profile get.. And Ray and I were talking mentioned in passing, Hey, we just got the Evel Knievel property. His eyes, you know, Wait, what? They just got a foot big and he was like, Oh my God. He was so excited. He was like, Oh man, yeah, you could do this. And then there's this, and then there's this he's talking a hundred miles an hour and he's got all these ideas. He just gets it. He just sees it. He's just in love with it. And the conversation ends with him literally threatening my life, being like,"You realize, at the very least, I have to do a cover.""I will murder you if I don't get to do a cover." And those are the people you want to hire. Those are the people you want working on this. And these are the people that are going to be bringing us the art, the stories, the editing, the whole nine yards. I've tried to surround myself with people who've just fallen in love with the man and the history and the swagger and the folklore and the approach that we're taking to this.

Joe P: 32:27

There was an Evel Knievel comic book, though, wasn't there?

Rylend: 32:30

I think I have one lying around here. Ideal Toys, back in the Seventies, at the height of the Evel Knievel toy popularity, commissioned Marvel Comics to do a 12 page comic book. It doesn't have much to do with the man. Really it is an instruction manual on how to play with the toys and it is just a sales tool basically. Evel is meeting with someone and it's like, "Hey, do you want to talk about this?" And he is like, "Yes, why don't you join me in my Scramble Van over here and we'll have a nice discussion about it." And then there's a voice of God being like, "the Evel Knievel Scramble Van is available in fine stores everywhere." It's kind of cheese bag. I mean, we can appreciate it. Because it is so antithetical to the man in a lot of ways. But it's fun and it is interesting.. You and I were talking about this at San Diego Comic-Con. What I found as a piece of history, as an indication of where children's entertainment was going, when I grew up and was watching children's cartoons in the Eighties, in the Nineties, you had all these cartoons: Heman, Mask, um, GI Joe and Transformers. They were stories. Transformers more so stories than this was. But really they were commercials for toys, and they were drawn, conceived in a way that taught you how to play with the toys and forced you to need and want the toys. I thought that was so interesting. It didn't become a full thing until the Eighties. The roots of it, original explorations of that, were in these shows you're talking about. It's here distilled in the best way. It is funny. I never thought about this as an important piece of history, aside from Evel Knievel, but it is.

Rachel: 34:25

Branded content, sponsored content, it's just so fascinating because you can watch an old I Love Lucy episode and at the end it's like,"and this episode was sponsored by Marlboro cigarettes, the best cigarette to have at after every meal." Like, whatever it was. You had these guys like Evel Knievel. The way that he branded himself, the way that he marketed himself, reminds me also of , oddly enough, Walt Disney where the story behind Walt Disney and the theme parks is like the Magical World of Disney, that TV show is how he paid for the theme parks. But it's also just one long commercial for the theme parks. This is the same kind of thing. It then eventually this turns into, you know, the Mr. Beast games that are also selling Mr. Beast candy bars and soda and stuff like that. It all comes back to these really interesting roots and like yeah, sometimes they're not like, it is funny. So you have the voice of God just saying,"Hey, you could go buy this here." But there's something interesting about, like, I especially love, there is a page of that comic where he has to crash his car

Joe P: 35:46

Yes.

Rachel: 35:46

on purpose to get out of trouble. And again, it's showing, Hey, we have this cool car that you can crash that will split into a million pieces. And then you could put it back together. That is like a better version of sometimes what you see in a YouTube video or anything else where they're like," And this episode was sponsored by Raycon Ear Buds.""That's how I'm currently listening to you." And you're like, okay, shh. Shut up. True.

Joe P: 36:19

Yeah. That happens to be my favorite panel from that comic book, too, when he tells the car, "I love you, Crash Car."

Rylend: 36:30

We went through the comic book almost panel by panel while we were at San Diego Comic-Con. There are just certain things where, it was like the thing we discovered is, so his motorcycle, there's a panel where it talks about the motorcycle's complex, high tech suspension system that allows him to land effort effortlessly and without inuring himself. My goodness. We both had to stop and be like, The toy had better suspension than Evel's actual motorcycles did while he was jumping. because he is jumping on desert bikes or whatever that had an inch and a half of give. And it's like, well if he had had that sort of suspension on his actual motorcycles, then maybe a couple of these jumps would've went a little better for him.

Joe P: 37:13

Ideal Toy Company came up with these things and then paid to have made life-size models as if they were real. He didn't really jump the Stunt and Crash Car, ever, but they did build a full scale model out of a 1972 Gremlin that would crash into a wall. The hood would blow off and steam would pour out of gas cylinders. We've got that at the museum. AMF had that trike that a kid could drive around. It was about the size of a Big Wheel, if you remember those when you were a kid. They had a full size trike that he rode onto the Sonny and Cher Show. That was a full-sized model of it. We've got that and it's cool. And of course, the Sky Cycle or rocket. Yeah. That's one that he actually did use. It's amazing.

Rylend: 38:05

It was shocking to me that it, again, you look back and it's like, well, this was it. It's like he had this amazing character, this better than fiction character, lying there the whole time. And nobody did anything with it.

Joe P: 38:21

Have you heard any reaction from the fans or otherwise about your Kickstarter campaign that started today?

Rachel: 38:28

I have an interesting fan story. We're trying to do all sorts of different weird marketing things. I went on to Reddit, of all places, just to see what was going on out there. I ended up making friends with the moderator of the Evel Knievels subreddit. He basically was like, this is the best thing to ever happen. And talking about that Wembley story. He's so down with everything and he was just like, " I cannot believe it."" You have to do the arc where he comes out here." Because the guy I was talking to, the guy is actually Scottish and so he's an Evel Knievel fan that saw him jump out there. It was just such a weird thing to be like, I just made friends with someone halfway around the world because of Evel Knievel. It's really funny.

Rylend: 39:23

The fans are wildly enthusiastic and it's like an immediate open door invitation. It's an immediate bonding thing where it's like, oh my God. Yeah. Evel was the and we saw it at the con panel where it was like, there were just people that were just so excited and they were just so on board and it's like," My dad and I, we watched every jump."" When I was twelve, I made this jacket and I wore it every day until it fell off of me." They're so thankful to us for doing something with the character, with the property. People get this immediately. They're in on this immediately. They're excited for this immediately. So that is a blessing, but it can also be a curse because when you're dealing with a beloved character, you better treat it right. You better do it with love and respect. You better do it justice because Evel Knievel fans are very passionate. And if you do it wrong, if you do him wrong, if you do not respect the history, they're going to let you know about it. You know better than anybody I know. Yeah,

Joe P: 40:23

Expect to get what fact checked.

Rylend: 40:26

I guess I'm used to it. I don't know if I'm prepared for the volume to get turned up the way it'll get turned up.

Rachel: 40:31

I think it's a good thing all overall. Yeah. Because that's how much they love him. I remember this story by R.L.Stein, who wrote the Goosebumps books. Yeah. And he said like, the best fan letter he ever got was from like an 11-year-old who said, "I've read every one of your books. They're just, okay." I think the energy that we're going to get is that some, like, someone's going to be like, yeah, I bought every issue and I also bought all the swag and the merchandise. You know, you messed up. He didn't actually jump 12 buses, he jumped 13 that one time. So, you know, just so you know. Yeah. You're like, thanks man, I love you.

Rylend: 41:15

Because here's the thing, it's like certain things are inarguable. So much of this stuff, is totally not verifiable. And again, like we talked about it right off the bat where it's like, well, I get a version from Kelly.. I get a slightly different I got a slightly different version from this book I read. I got a slightly different version from a guy who was there in a documentary 10 years ago. And so there are people who will be militant that their version was the right version. But I don't know. A lot of this stuff is not verifiable. But again, it is the beauty of the subject matter. It is why this stuff is amazing. And it is something that we are trying to celebrate. In the book we are treating all of this as it's fact, but it's also folklore. And where does the fact begin in the folklore end? And

Joe P: 42:07

You guys are going to do an awesome job. I can't

Rylend: 42:09

wait to see it. The first issue of the Last Gladiator arc is available on Kickstarter on September 15th. It's a Monday. You can just go to Kickstarter and search Evel Knievel and it'll be there.

Joe P: 42:22

I'll put that in the show notes.

Rachel: 42:23

Best way pre-order your book. And also there's a lot of really interesting add-ons and goodies that you can get that will be exclusive just to the Kickstarter.

Rylend: 42:34

You're going to love what we're putting in front of you. And we're doing it with love.

Rachel: 42:38

Yeah. Make sure you check out every cover because we'll have multiple covers. We're going to have one by Ray Anthony Height, one by Flops, and David Acosta. Comic book legends there.

Joe P: 42:47

Rachel, I have a question. Thank

Rachel: 42:48

you. Yes. What is your question?

Joe P: 42:50

Our museum is moving to downtown Las Vegas.

Rachel: 42:53

It is.

Joe P: 42:53

What has your experience been with downtown Las Vegas? Do you have any tips and tricks for us?

Rachel: 42:59

So I lived at the Plaza Hotel on Fremont Street for roughly two months. I was working on a TV show called Cash Floor. It was in, it was literally in the Plaza Hotel in an elevator. What we would do every day is we would just would ask random people if they wanted to be on a game show. And that's all they knew is that they were going to be on a game show. They didn't know where it was. And we'd be like, okay, yeah, you got to come with us and we're going to go into the elevator and we're going to take you up to where we're filming. And they'd be like, okay, okay, okay. And then we'd go in and then all of a sudden lights would go off. It was just great to pull random people. Because a lot of times they have been drinking, they've been whatever. And my job on the game show is I was actually writing the questions. That was my job as I was a writer for all these questions and trying to figure out after the first week of running this game show, we went, I've got to dumb down the questions a lot. People are way too blitzed to be answering like, oh, history questions or stuff like that.

Joe P: 44:20

Where are you? How did you get here?

Rachel: 44:25

And I lived in a hotel room and something that I discovered about Vegas, that I love more than anything, is the food in Vegas because you can get any type of food you desire because it's like, since the casinos are there, since they're already bringing in boatloads of all this stuff. You can go and get like a lobster eggs benedict at like a greasy spoon diner. Oh my God. Just the food is phenomenal. Also Fremont Street. I love that you guys are at Fremont Street because there's the Strip and that's where people go to go visit Vegas. They're going to go to the Strip. Locals go to Fremont Street. It's such a different vibe. You just walk around. The lights there. Everything just feels like real Vegas in a different way. If you also are a big fan of thrift stores, I love thrifting. That's a great thing to do nearby. Go down Main Street. There's a bunch of really cool thrift stores and you can find stuff because you have all these like legends that lived there and at some point they just hocked all their stuff. I think you can go with a plan or you can just go without a plan. There's all sorts of cool things that you can see there. We are planning as part of our promotional tour of Evel Knievel comics, we are planning on coming out and visiting Evel Pie and seeing you.

Rylend: 46:13

We can't wait to get into the museum. Once the museum is up and running, we'd love to do an event there also. I want to see the new space more than anything. It would also be nice to just be like, Hey, here's the book and here's the signing, and here's some wacky celebration. I mean, We've been trying to put our heads together and figure out what is a good creative way to promote the book.

Joe P: 46:41

How do you inspire courage in others?

Rylend: 46:43

I have been teaching for a while now. I teach writing. I teach comic book creation in prisons. Currently at the California State Prison at Lancaster, but also Valley State Prison. I teach a lot. I teach at the Los Angeles Film School. Yeah, the correctional facilities is a really interesting thing. I don't know what they've been through and they don't know what I've been through. But we can meet at this place of, well, we all know what it's like to have been through stuff and I should not be where I am today. I grew up in a housing project in Detroit. Life was not easy growing up. I've been through some stuff and so I know what that's like. I was able to kind of bite and claw my way out for a couple of reasons. Guys that grew up where I grew up did not, basically, they were born, they lived and died all within like this five mile radius, right? They did not get out and become Hollywood screenwriters and write comic books about legendary figures. That was not on the menu for a guy like me, but there were a few people in my life, and Evel Knievel chief among them were Evel Knievel was a dirt bag kid from a mining town. He bit and clawed his way to becoming the most famous man in the world and that was just such an inspirational story. It's like, look what we can do. It was not without its trials and tribulations. The guy fell over and over and over again. He almost died over and over and over again. But every time he got up, he dusted himself off. He healed. He got back on the motorcycle, he jumped again. And watching that was very inspiring to me. That was part of it. The other part of it was, well, we all go through stuff. I am not unique in that I have been through stuff. What separates me from other people was that I turned towards it. I didn't run from it. I over time decided to deal seriously with it. Right. This has been kicking my ass my entire life. If I do not stop and turn towards this and put it to bed, then I'm done. How I dealt with it was writing. I've done the therapy thing, I've done the group thing, and talking about my stuff helps, but nothing helped me like sitting down and having to contend with it and to tell it like a story, to put it in a format that someone else could read it and understand where I came from, where I was going, the lessons I had learned from it. I didn't understand myself until I had to do that, until I had to write my own story. And that saved me. The reason I'm here, the reason I am who I am today and as a man that I'm proud of and excited to be is because I did that. I think that that is earth shattering. I think that that is a silver bullet. And so, in a place like Lancaster, you got a lot of guys who are dealing with a lot of heavy stuff. And I go in there and I tell them, Hey, I'm no savior but I have this thing that worked for me and I will tell you how and why it worked for me. I will give you the tools that I use to do this. If it helps you, I am here to help you along the journey. I have been just like wildly excited about how many people have taken the opportunity seriously. And have really just thrown themselves into it, you know? And guys that didn't even expect to. There are guys that signed up for my classes inside that wanted two hours where they didn't have to worry about fighting anybody, right? That's all they were looking for. But they went in there and they listened, and man, did they find something over time. So we teach this class. I do it with a guy named Ben Franzen. Ben Franzen is this really inspiring guy. He runs a nonprofit called the Ben Free Project. And his story is, he was convicted of a murder that he didn't commit. He spent 18 years in prison, was later completely exonerated. Should have been completely exonerated much sooner, but sometimes life deals you a bad hand. Now he is out. And he is trying to make the world a better place. And in prison, there were certain programs that were open to him and he, like me, writing helped him deal with what he had to deal with. Writing saved him. He wrote his way out of prison to a degree. The reason he was able to prove his innocence was because he started writing about it. When it was clear that he was going to be getting out, he applied to the writing program at UCLA. He was accepted while he was still inside. He moved from prison to a UCLA dorm. That was where he founded the Ben Free Project and started inspiring people by telling his story. He is now in a grad writing program at San Diego State and applying to doctoral programs, and getting published everywhere. He and I go in together and we teach these guys. We give these guys the tools that helped us, and so we teach the class. But the other thing we're doing is we are one of the other things that Half Evil Comics is doing, my company that's publishing the Evel Knievel book, is we are publishing an anthology of stories about the carceral experience. The stories come from people inside. Carceral affected is a pretty big basket. That can mean a family member at home who's dealing with losing somebody. It could be the victim of a crime. It could be a guard. It could be a police officer. It could be any of these things. It's mostly people who are inside. We are pulling stories from the classes we're teaching. We have formerly incarcerated national book award winners who are contributing, Eisner winning comic artists. We are putting this anthology together stories from this experience. The last class we taught at Lancaster. Stories are kind of still trickling in. We have already signed two gentlemen to the anthology. The stories are already starting to come and it was amazing. We did our last class with them last week and we were able to present them with contracts and with acceptance letters through the anthology. So, they take our class and they learn to write and they learn to deal with what they're dealing with. They come out of the class, if they're so inclined, and if they put the work in, they come out as published authors. They start to build something that, I mean, Ben made it a career. We deal with a lot of people at the Ben Free project who made it a career, who started out writing inside and they went on and they were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes and they became National Book Award winners. My hope, my greatest dream, is that maybe we end up with somebody like that. We're already helping people deal with their stuff. There are a lot of just really talented people in there so that's kind of awesome.

Joe P: 53:32

I think that's so neat that your measure of ultimate success is somebody else succeeding.

Rylend: 53:38

Yeah, there were people that did this for me. The reason I am where I am is because there were five or six people who stopped and listened, and they met me where I was at.. They handed me a pen at the right time or whatever. I know where I would be if those people hadn't done that. It is now my duty to pay it forward. When we started Half Evil comics, it was built into the mission statement. We are going to inspire as many people as humanly possible to do this. This is possible, this is helpful. The act of creation is helpful, but the books inspire people also. My first comic book, Aberrant, is kind of a Hollywood action movie, but really it is this treatise on loss. It is about a special operations commander that loses his entire unit to a superhuman attack and then tries to go after the people responsible. So again, Hollywood action movie. But really it is a treatise on grief. It is a love letter to the people who have to go and fight our wars for us. There is not a convention, there is not a San Diego Comic-Con, that goes by where I don't get a veteran, or somebody like that, that comes up to me with tears in his eyes and wants to give me a hug. And he is like, This means a lot to me. You got us right. You did us justice. Like I don't see myself in a lot of things, but here I am. And that was so meaningful and I was dealing with my own loss. My family was full of veterans and my dad died of cancer caused by Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. And this dumb action book was my way of dealing with that. The fact that that has such a positive effect on others is amazing. It's earth shattering. And if you don't take that seriously, then there's something wrong with you, I think.

Joe P: 55:42

I think so too. You know what I hate? The fact that inspiration, that you really feel inspiration more from tears than laughter. I want all my inspiration to be joy. But you're right. I mean, the most impactful stories from museum guests are these guys that are beaten down find the courage to stand up to their oppressor.

Rachel: 56:07

There's hope and joy in that, I think, which is really nice. That's something that I fall in love with stories where there are like Evel, we know the end. We know what the end of his life was like. While it was very tough because of all the pain and all of the broken bones, broken relationships, broken all these different things, at the same time, there was a sense of hope and joy at the end because he was able to go back and make right what he had screwed up and he was able to find redemption. And he was also able to inspire this new generation. And I think that is fascinating. And there's something, There's light at the end of all these tunnels. True joy is that feeling of certainty, hope, peace that can't be taken away from you. It's not just, oh, I laughed and that was joy, but you have joy in the bad days, too.

Joe P: 57:28

I wanted to welcome both of you to this super fantastic group of fandom and just to let you know that we're here for you.

Rachel: 57:39

If you are watching, you might see my initials. It says RE Nelson. So my nickname is Reeroe by my family. So you can find me as Ms. Reeroe. Ms. Reeroe pretty much on everything else. Or you can hang out with me with the Half Evil comics label. You can find us on all socials, including YouTube, where we have a wonderful podcast hosted by Rylend and David Avallone. It is called The Writer's Block. We won a telly and yeah, go hang out with Do not short me a

Rylend: 58:11

Telly

Rachel: 58:12

Two Tellies. I'm so sorry.

Rylend: 58:14

Yeah.

Rachel: 58:15

I will not short you a Telly, sir. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rylend: 58:18

I am at Rylend Grant that is, R-Y-L-E-N-D-G-R-A-N-T. If you're just listening, I have to spell it because it's not a real name. My parents just kind of drunkenly arranged letters and saddled me with it, and so now I've got to spell it for you guys. We do have this great Business of Comics podcast that has been celebrated and plenty of good Evel Knievel content coming on both of those. We'll have Joe on. We'll have Kelly on, and you will see us at the museum down the road and at Evel Pie. If you're an Evel fan, you're going to have a lot to chew on, so come eat.

Joe P: 58:48

Yeah, come eat. Well, until next time, y'all, Happy Landings. Happy landings.

Rachel: 58:54

Happy landings.

Joe P: 58:55

Alright, thanks. I'll see you guys.

Heather: 58:58

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. It's our mission to preserve and present the legacy of Evel Knievel. if you have an idea for an episode or a guest, or have a suggestion to improve our show, just drop us a line at joe at thrill dot show.

Evel Knievel: 59:18

I just think the Evel Knievel way.

Heather: 59:23

We leave you with the encouraging words from the book of Deuteronomy. Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terririfed, for the Lord your God goes with you. He will never leave you or forsake you. Until next time, happy landings! You like to fly to the seat of your pants? This is where you belong.