Glenn Beck is joined by Eric July, who is challenging Marvel and challenging them in a big way. Also, Vivek Rameshwamy was on talking about ESG, BlackRock, and what is happening to our energy sector. And we also spent a little time on the possible climate emergency order that the President and the White House have been talking about.
00:30:46.600Welcome to the Glenn Beck program. You know, the thing I love about the host on Blaze TV is they all own their own shows. I own my show. And Pat owns his. Eric July owns his. And so you attract entrepreneurs.
00:31:14.700And Eric July is an entrepreneur, man. I can't tell you, Eric, how happy I am for you. When I first saw the news that you were putting out a comic book and you were crowdfunding and you were looking for a million dollars and you hit that in the first 24 hours.
00:31:33.840And now you're almost up to three million dollars. I have to tell you, God bless America. You you are sending. I'm guessing. I'm guessing. I don't know because I don't know the comic world. But if I'm sitting there at Marvel, as I'm looking at things like how badly Thor did and Disney, how bad their numbers are starting to look.
00:31:59.840And DC, which just always sucks. I I'm thinking we we should probably not go so deep into the woke front. Have you seen what Ripaverse is doing?
00:32:11.220This has been just an incredible experience. And I've been talking about the state of the comic book industry for a very long time.
00:32:18.800And for us to put this out and to get the reception that we got, it just reassures kind of everything it was that I was saying.
00:32:27.040And that is that people still want this stuff. They might be going out to try to, let's say, import, let's say someone else's material like the Japanese with manga because the American stuff sucks right now so much.
00:32:41.860But this proved that, hey, people still want this stuff. They're still enthusiastic about it.
00:32:48.040They just don't want any of the nonsense that's tied certainly to the American comic book industry right now.
00:32:53.600So this has just been insane in the sense that it just reassures everything that I've been talking about for a while.
00:33:00.580And Eric, the the best example of this, I think, is the latest Thor, which is just laden with wokeness.
00:33:09.360Every every every relationship in the movie just about is a gay relationship.
00:33:15.520And then they then they throw in the thing where the two gay men have a biological baby together.
00:33:23.740And so they're even doing things that don't make any sense just to bend over backward and and pander to the LGBTQ committee, which which is fine if you want to do that.
00:33:36.480I mean, I don't I don't care about the sexuality of the characters.
00:33:39.540It's just I don't want that jam down my throat.
00:33:42.260I just want an enjoyable movie and an enjoyable comic book, which is what you're doing, essentially.
00:33:48.900Exactly. I mean, that's really all people want.
00:33:51.080It's not about not seeing black characters or even, you know, whatever sexuality or whatever.
00:33:56.760But when you're beating your audience over the head with it and it's clearly become just a vanity project for all of these people to write their own goofy stories.
00:34:04.480And oftentimes they don't make sense for those characters that they wrote.
00:34:08.500You know, I talked about this in and our kind of opening kind of trailer where I discuss like, hey, you've seen your characters that you love be bastardized.
00:34:15.620And that's the fundamental issue. They're not creating new characters or something.
00:34:19.140They're taking the character that everybody knows and recognize like the Tim Drakes of the world and they just make them bisexual out of nowhere and weird stuff like that.
00:34:28.240So that that this resonates with so many people because they have been assured that, OK, this is something new and fresh, but we don't have to go through that.
00:34:35.920We're not going to be gas lit by by the companies themselves, the actors or the actresses or we're not.
00:34:43.120That's not going to happen. And this is what people want.
00:34:45.320So we just made it easy and just put the stuff out there.
00:34:49.220I will tell you that, you know, you probably know this better than I do.
00:34:53.520But the reason why we have superheroes is because of times like this, you know, back in World War Two, it was a it was such a powerful force that we didn't we felt small, insignificant and didn't know how to stop all of the problems.
00:35:12.960So we came up with superheroes. Well, our problems are just as big.
00:35:17.920But our superheroes now, the ones that they're ones that now that they're woke, they're not they're just part of the problem.
00:35:26.460It's no longer an escape and it's no longer a a a powerful being that can supersede everything else and just be above all of it.
00:35:39.180That that's the secret to a good comic character, isn't it?
00:35:42.260Absolutely. And I talk about this, about acknowledging those sort of universal truths.
00:35:46.820And that's where we got away from with the comic book industry right now.
00:35:50.760What is just what is right? What is, you know, good?
00:35:54.480What is bad? Like that stuff has gone completely out the window because a lot of folks are more obsessed with their individual social preferences and social agenda that they may have.
00:36:04.620And it, of course, bleeds off into their work. So these people don't look like all these characters or say definitely the superheroes, the one that are supposed to be good.
00:36:13.680They're more interested in using them as a vehicle to lecture them about election, their audience about stuff that they don't even care about.
00:36:20.540And it's not about that character going around kicking butt, fighting off the evil that kind of goes out out of the realm of reality right now.
00:36:30.040It's more about, hey, I want to use this character so you can accept my individual agenda.
00:36:35.440And I'm going to use that character that you know and love to as a vehicle to really get this message out of there.
00:36:40.900And it just makes for very, very bad art.
00:36:44.160Yeah. So you tell me, because if again, if I were in this industry, I would see you selling 30,000 copies on day one as a disturbing trend for my company.
00:37:00.780Two questions. Have you heard anything even through the grapevine from these companies or any reaction from these companies like Marvel?
00:37:10.480A hundred percent. We know that's exactly what's happening is insiders that have already talked about this, about, hey, that's putting them on notice.
00:37:18.840Disney's looking at it like, well, hey, this is something that is happening.
00:37:22.940It's not to say that we're going to completely upend what it is that they're doing.
00:37:25.960But, you know, you're saying that maybe junk, maybe a lot of what they're doing isn't as lucrative as what they anticipate.
00:37:33.460So they see this guy who's been doing comic book commentary come in and make this amount of money, sell this amount of copies.
00:37:39.720I mean, people need to understand the magnitude of this for those that don't like they would classify our book as a graphic novel, per se.
00:37:48.580That's what they were called because of how big it is.
00:37:51.680If you look at those sales in comparison to like the what's going to the North American comic book sales, we've already destroyed any book that they've put out that's in this genre.
00:38:01.520Marvel, be it DC image, but we've destroyed anything that they put out all of 2021, of course, last year.
00:38:09.540So it shows that, of course, this is a thirsty market here.
00:38:12.800But we're doing something that they said could not happen.
00:38:18.440You have to sexuality swap because people already have these characters that they're tied to and they recognize.
00:38:22.860And we show, no, you give them something interested that that they can be interested in, then they will certainly, you know, you'll reap the benefits.
00:38:31.400And that's what's happening right now.
00:38:32.500So the next question is, people sometimes build businesses and they become very, very successful and a Facebook will come in and buy them and just absorb them sometimes to sit on them, sometimes to use them, but make it theirs.
00:38:52.260Would you sell if they came to you and said, hey, we'll offer you whatever, would you sell?
00:38:58.760They couldn't buy it for $100 million.
00:39:01.300They couldn't buy it for $100 billion because if they're willing to pay for it that much, I can make that much myself.
00:39:06.740So I look at it from a creative standpoint as well as a businessman.
00:39:12.960The point of this whole thing that we're doing is that I looked at the industry.
00:39:17.340I saw a problem with it, a fundamental issue with it, and I wanted to do things my sort of own way.
00:39:22.900I took the, let's say, what people are doing like in a crowdfunding space.
00:39:26.680I took it, made it my own kind of spin on it, giving people the visual numbers so they can see it and all of that, while also already having the work done.
00:39:36.460I already paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that I can make this happen, which is why we can get it to the audience relatively quick.
00:39:43.200So if they came to me with a dollar amount, I could refuse it because this is the whole point.
00:39:49.820I don't want to have to go through you guys.
00:39:51.580I want to be able to show folks that we can do this in a far more decentralized way than what it was before.
00:39:59.080Yeah, as a libertarian, philosophically, that's what I want.
00:40:02.280I don't like the idea that there's these mega corporate entities, billion-dollar corporate entities that have control of all of these properties.
00:40:08.980We have a direct, just with the internet and the technology alone, we have a direct line of sight with our audience.
00:40:14.920We don't have to go through the old guard anymore, and that's probably what frustrates these guys more than anything if they write these hit pieces.
00:40:22.800It's that we're seeing success, but we're also not going through them, so they can't give me enough money to take my property, not at all.
00:40:29.420All right, so Eric, can you give us just a one-minute rundown of what the characters are, what's happening in book one?
00:40:40.860Yeah, so Isom issue number one, it deals with a character by the name of Avery Seelman.
00:41:08.200And his sister, Altona, gives him a call and wants him to visit an old friend because there was another different friend, a family friend, that was interning with his sister.
00:41:17.840And she's like, hey, can you go check it, check this out?
00:41:32.460So even though he doesn't like being in the city, he's going to, for the sake of his sister, for the sake of this old friend, he's going to go check this out.
00:41:40.360And, of course, he has kind of the longest day in his life meeting all these interesting characters that all of you guys are going to, of course, enjoy.