Chris is on Infinite Earths, Episode 34: Leonard the Duck??? (1996)
Before starting today, I’d just like to share that we hit a blogging milestone yesterday. Right around 9am Arizona Voodoo Time, Chris is on Infinite Earths broke 800,000 pageviews. I’m not sure quite how accurate Blogger’s stats are… but, in this game, we take any victory we can get.
I’m well aware that if we discount bots and folks who don’t know how to spell the word “Crisis”, there are probably a few dozen genuine “hits” there… so, any celebration is a little bit tempered.
Anyhoo, onto today’s conversation…
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I’ve been in a mindset where I’m really trying to focus on the future… exactly what that’s going to mean and look like for my “content creation” side. I still don’t quite know… at least not enough to make a definitive statement about anything. I have some ideas, but… that’s really all I’ve got at this point.
I am still gathering my thoughts, planning goals, and deciding whether or not there’s even still a place for me in the already overcrowded and back-bitey commentary community. Again, I have ideas… but, that’s about it.
So, what in the blue hell does my existential/inertial/motivational crisis have to do with Leonard the Duck? Why am I throwing this character in y’alls faces again? Well, this episode of Chris is on Infinite Earths was a result of the last time I took a look into the nebulous “future”.
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If you’re a long-time listener of my solo-output, you might have been able to tell that this Leonard episode was something of a departure from my usual way of “doing business”. Gone where self-indulgent stories and anecdotes from my life… replaced with actual comics facts and history. It wasn’t exactly a subtle shift in tone…
… and, that was intentional.
Y’see, this episode of Chris is on Infinite Earths (along with the episode that followed it) acted sort of as a “pilot” for what Chris and Reggie’s Cosmic Treadmill was going to look like moving into the future… at least for the immediate future.
Following Reggie’s stroke at the end of 2019, we had to put a pin in the old ways of putting together Cosmic Treadmill episodes. Reggie suffered partial blindness and was easily fatigued when trying to read. For a while, he wasn’t able to make out words at all. He wouldn’t be able to read or write the sort of scripts we usually worked with… and so, we’d have to “pivot”, reevaluate… and adapt.
We still wanted to deliver the sort of content we were “known” for (even if it was only us who “knew us” for it), but we had to be a bit more creative about it. The answer was to sort of create a “hybrid” program, wherein we mixed elements from our Cosmic Treadmill, Weird Comics History, and Comix Tawk shows. Bits and pieces from each, in order to serve as sort of a band-aid/bridge until Reggie was recovered and confident enough for us to go back to “business as usual”.
This Leonard the Duck solo episode was sort of my “proof of concept”… showing that it was possible to mingle the Cosmic Treadmill with bits of Weird Comics History… and the editorializing of Comix Tawk. I feel like it was successful on that front… though, unfortunately, I wouldn’t imagine Reggie ever got around to listening to it.
In our final few phone calls, we brainstormed pretty heavily about what the “Chris and Reggie Summer” was going to look (and sound) like. I’ve still got a handful of partially finished scripts on my Google Drive. The gimmick was going to be less verbatim scripting… more off-the-cuff… more “bullet pointy”, with a reliance on me to deliver/feed things like dates and factoids… while he would focus on elaborating and editorializing. It… ya know, it just felt “right”… one of those “So crazy it just might work…” sort of things.
I feel as though this Leonard the Duck episode put me in the proper head space for the evolution in the way we were going to create together… and, the fact that I felt as though I pulled it off decently enough, gave me the confidence to know that we’d definitely be able to make it work.
Thanks for reading this odd little stream of consciousness piece… and thank you for helping this little blog break 800k views.
I like the idea of a podcast with a mix of history & commentary like you thought about doing. It would have been like in Baseball you have the play by play person and the "color" commentary person.
I'm glad to hear you are thinking about the future of what you do content wise, I look forward to hearing or reading whatever that might be if it happens.