Happy Fred Van Lente Day, everyone! Click here to see more Fred Van Lente Day celebrations from this year and years past.

Our festivities come to a close with a chat with Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey about Action Philosophers #1, which came out 15 years ago, the same year that the first Fred Van Lente Day occurred!

Enjoy!

Brian Cronin: Welcome to our Fred Van Lente Day discussion of Action Philosophers #1 with co-creators Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey! Thanks for coming, guys.

Fred Van Lente: I can't believe I turned 15 today. I don't feel a day older than 47

Ryan Dunlavey: Oh no, I bought you beer! I'm going to jail.

Fred Van Lente: Worth it.

Brian Cronin: It's funny, I say the 15th anniversary of Action Philosophers. But it really started before that and just got into its own comic in 2005.

Fred Van Lente: Sort of, yeah. It was printed for the first time not on a photocopier 15 years ago

Brian Cronin: Can you speak a bit about the odd origins of Action Philosophers to even get to #1?

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, we made the first episode in 2002. it was for an anthology with an open submission policy...and it was rejected!

Fred Van Lente: For SPX, the small press expo

Brian Cronin: Ha!

Ryan Dunlavey: Yup. And then every single indie publisher turned it down over the next two years.

Fred Van Lente: Except for the one that went out of business before a single issue was published. "Prophecy"

Ryan Dunlavey: Ha! Yes.

Fred Van Lente: They were this giant tabloid sized anthology, it was going to be a free newspaper in coffee shops, like The Onion. So, like The Onion, had it actually gotten into print, it no longer would have been in print now.

Ryan Dunlavey: They commissioned three more stories and then promptly folded

Brian Cronin: When did you guys first meet?

Fred Van Lente: Prison aka Syracuse University

Ryan Dunlavey: Close - it was a comic book club at Syracuse U.

Fred Van Lente: It would have been 1991-ish

Brian Cronin: How many people were in the club?

Fred Van Lente: Ryan, you'd know that better than me.

Ryan Dunlavey: We maxed out at 20 members at one point. A lot of nerds.

Fred Van Lente: There was a core of like 8-12, I'd say

Ryan Dunlavey: Yup. People came and went because they'd graduate.

Fred Van Lente: Ryan was president at one point

Ryan Dunlavey: A thankless job, but fun! I turned it over to Donato Giancola, then he gave it to Steve Ellis and then we just kinda were a communist collective

Brian Cronin: So did you guys do any indie stuff together while still in college?

Fred Van Lente: We'd create a comic book anthology every year with the student fee. That's where my first collaboration with Steve Ellis happened. "Rectal Voyage," a tasteful parody of Fantastic Voyage and Ronald Reagan's colon cancer

Ryan Dunlavey: We both made comics but not together. I mostly worked solo at that point

Brian Cronin: It's amazing how much comic book talent was in just that one Syracuse comic book club

Fred Van Lente: Steve and Ryan also traded art directorship of The Daily Orange, the SU student paper. Or did you share the job at one point?

Ryan Dunlavey: Nah - I was never art director there, I just drew comics and art. Which was stupid, since that job actually PAID

Fred Van Lente: Weirdly, Comics Plus was founded by a guy from my tiny high school in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. That's how I got involved. He was a real charismatic dude. I knew a couple like him at SU. After college though they kind of fade away.

Ryan Dunlavey: Matt Johnson - we became pretty good friends in college

Fred Van Lente: Sweet guy. He was a senior when I was a freshman so we weren't close. He had an earring. And a leather jacket! That can get you drive out of Chagrin Falls, like John Rambo in "First Blood"

Brian Cronin: I guess having a community makes it seem more like a realistic goal. Like, if you know a bunch of other guys doing the same thing it doesn't seem as hard to imagine.

Fred Van Lente: That's a good point, Brian, I never thought about that before, it did make comics more real than any of the other things I was studying--movies, prose.

Fred Van Lente: Steve Ellis started getting work at Marvel and DC before he graduated.

Ryan Dunlavey: I was so jealous, but also it was pretty cool to see one of your pals working for Marvel

Brian Cronin: I can imagine! It's like Joe Madureira getting gigs at Marvel while still in high school!

Ryan Dunlavey: Joe M went to high school with my wife!

Fred Van Lente: Steve hit the pro ground running almost immediately. This was the early 1990s so Image had just hit, and there were Malibu and Valiant all running pretty slick operations. Steve basically got me my first comics writing gig at Malibu--though they had been bought by Marvel at this point.

Ryan Dunlavey: And he also drew the cover of my first pro comics work, I colored an indie book called "Trauma Corps"

Brian Cronin: Yeah, the boom necessitated a bunch of new artists. Malibu post-Marvel purchase hired a lot of interesting new guys. That was some of Brian Michael Bendis first major work, for instance.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, if I was getting coloring work, the bar was pretty low

Fred Van Lente: I was at grad school in Pittsburgh and hated it. Steve and I sold a series to Malibu, what would ultimately become THE SILENCERS, so I decided to move out to Brooklyn with him. And we dragged Ryan with it. If I remember correctly I drove across Pennsylvania and at some point we stayed at Ryan's folks' house in Doylsetown? Maybe I'm remembering that part wrong.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yes, the night before we all moved to NYC

Fred Van Lente: Right, we had this nice house in Park Slope, before that neighborhood became stupid pricey.

Fred Van Lente: This was in 1996, so we decided to break into comics RIGHT when the market completely collapsed.

Ryan Dunlavey: Somehow I broke in at Wizard as a graphic designer and stayed there for 2 years.

Fred Van Lente: I got sent Marvel's bankruptcy filing because as my Malibu book did managed to get published I was technically a creditor.

Brian Cronin: Ha!

Ryan Dunlavey: I was just typesetting columns and designing articles and stuff back then

Brian Cronin: They were SO BIG then, I mean just page-wise. So that must have been a ton of design work

Ryan Dunlavey: Yup, it was a ton of work - there were only 3 of us in-house doing all the graphic design for three monthly magazines.

Fred Van Lente: After that first year we lost our house and the gang broke up. Steve Ellis and I got an apartment not too far from the first one with Jamal Igle. And Ryan moved into the same apartment he has now.

MysteriousPerson: What was the first comic book that you two did together?

Fred Van Lente: Action Philosophers.

Ryan Dunlavey: Stuperpowers! Does that count?

Brian Cronin: Stuperpowers?

Fred Van Lente: No! It's not a comic!

Ryan Dunlavey: Well we did a 2 page comic in it!

Fred Van Lente: We did? Okay, if you say so. I think Carson wrote that one.

Ryan Dunlavey: But really it was Action Philosophers

Brian Cronin: What was Stuperpowers?

Ryan Dunlavey: It was a role playing game we decided to self-publish.

Fred Van Lente: It's achieved a weird cult status among RPGers. Everyone played stupid superheroes with terrible and offensive powers. It's like if Kevin Smith's Clerks wasn't successful. Actually, yeah, I think Carson did write that...

Fred Van Lente: Ryan studiously avoided working with me. Originally he wanted my wife, Crystal, to do the comic for SPX. He knew I was Bad News. A rebel, Dottie.

Ryan Dunlavey: She's not as surly as you, Fred.

Fred Van Lente: Less intimidating, I get it. My raw sexuality can be off-putting

Brian Cronin: Had Crystal ever done any comic book writing at that point?

Fred Van Lente: No, Crystal's comics writing career was a ways off then. Thanks to ME holding her down.

Ryan Dunlavey: Crystal is a great writer as well and had helped me out with a few side projects so I thought it would be fun to collaborate.

Fred Van Lente: So, basically when I found out Ryan had asked Crystal to write something for him I whined until she begged off the project and I slid right in there.

Ryan Dunlavey: If only she wasn't married to Fred we might be DOMINATING comics right now

Fred Van Lente: PATRIARCHY!!!!! [does air karate moves] But seriously folks, we did "Neitzsche" for SPX. Rejected.

Ryan Dunlavey: Now she's a big shot playright so fat chance of us ever making a graphic novel together.

Brian Cronin: Whose idea was it to do a philosophy comic?

Ryan Dunlavey: Fred's

Fred Van Lente: It was the little comic you got with your Nietzsche action figure! Hence, "Action Philosophers"

Brian Cronin: What was your idea with Crystal, then?

Ryan Dunlavey: The anthology was biography themed. I suggested Crystal and I do a comic about Phineas Gage. She was doing a play about him at the time.

Fred Van Lente: She had written a musical about him, yeah. My sister directed it. It's the greatest puppet show about severe brain injuries to railroad workers you'll ever see.

Brian Cronin: Crystal IS great with her bio stuff. King Kirby was a treat.

Ryan Dunlavey: I also suggested we do a comic about Alexi Leonov - but Fred smartly suggested Nietzsche instead

Fred Van Lente: So we did "Nietzsche." It got rejected. Ryan sent it around to a bunch of publishers. The only nibble we got was the aforementioned start-up paper PROPHECY.

Ryan Dunlavey: The guys that ran it loved philosophy and suggested we make a series.

Fred Van Lente: PROPHECY was newspaper sized, so we did "Bodhidharma" and Plato in this really giant size.

Brian Cronin: Did you print it yourself, too, to sell at shows?

Ryan Dunlavey: I'd made a 8 pager of the Nietzsche comic that I gave to a few people

Brian Cronin: So there's a real Action Philosophers rarity out there!

Ryan Dunlavey: I think like 20 copies exists

Fred Van Lente: But after we did three stories, PROPHECY bombed out.

Ryan Dunlavey: But I was like hey- we've got an entire 32 page comic here! I'd really only done shorts at that point.

MysteriousPerson: How did you pick the philosophers in the first issue?

Fred Van Lente: "Nietzsche" because I was reading a lot of Nietzsche because I was 25 and pretentious. I had taken classes in Ancient Greek philosophy and Zen Buddhism is college so Plato and Bodhidharma were kind of low hanging fruit. Also, I had stumbled across the factoid that Plato had been a professional wrestler. And lo! A mascot for the series was born. "PLATO" means "broad" and Greek and it was essentially a stage name for him.

Ryan Dunlavey: I took Philosophy 101 and I got a C+. I think I had a bad teacher. Coincidentally I was drawing a flash cartoon that starred a masked wrestler! "Rod The Bod" He was basically a shorter Plato, minus the beard.

Fred Van Lente: So we had three finished stories and no publisher. And Ryan had to resize "Plato" and "Bodhidharma" to fit regular comics size -- or rather, mini-comics size, back when those were A Thing. So this was like, 2003 I think.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, and we took it to comic shows and it would always sell out.

Brian Cronin: It's interesting that it seems like Plato was the lead of the whole Action Philosophers angle, but, as you note, it wasn't about that at all, but due to the idea of this being the giveaway comic like the Masters of Universe mini-comics. That's hilarious.

Fred Van Lente: Yeah, it was that you got Nietzsche in "Ubermensch" leotard and cape

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah and that first comic had an ad for more Philosophy toys

Fred Van Lente: Exactly 0.3 seconds of thought went into all of these decisions

Ryan Dunlavey: "Albert Camus Slot Cars"

Fred Van Lente: Very Zen, in retrospect!

Brian Cronin: This really does change my whole reading of the first issue knowing that the chronology is all over the place.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, no plan whatsoever. I don't think I even did character sketches

Fred Van Lente: Someone, Chris Staros, I think, recommended we apply to the Xeric Grant, which was Peter Laird's self-publishing grant. This was in 2004. And we won! Two! Thousand! Dollars! Baby. Or $1500? Don't remember

Ryan Dunlavey: it was 2500! Enought to print 2 issues

Fred Van Lente: And, you know, we never sold THAT well, but well enough we didn't have to spend any of our own money to keep going, and we made some extra dough.

Ryan Dunlavey: We consistently sold out which was nice

Fred Van Lente: We made it to nine issues, which is a nice robust Marvel run these days, ha ha

Fred Van Lente: Of the Xeric Grant hopeful, we were I think also one of the more, well, "commercial" is the wrong word, but we were deeply obnoxious. If the subject matter had been anything other than philosophy I don't think we would have had a chance of winning, in retrosepct.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, we never really fit in with the indie OR mainstream crowds

Brian Cronin: So Ryan, you mentioned not even doing character sketches, so how did an issue of Action Philosophers get made? Did you guys plot it out together? Was there a script or what?

Ryan Dunlavey: Fred gave me a full script and I would show him the finished pages at that point he was lettering our work, so he would tweak the script after I handed back the art. There were very few revisions from either of us

Fred Van Lente: Being the letterer lets you easily rewrite stuff on the fly. I have been getting into lettering a lot more lately. I lettered The Comic Book Story of Basketball, for example.

Ryan Dunlavey: He's a good letterer! But I'm a control freak, so I took over sometime when we were doing Comic Book History of COmics

Brian Cronin: So how does that change things, if Fred is not lettering it after your art?

Ryan Dunlavey: Now I letter BEFORE I even draw, as I'm designing/laying out the page. It really helps a lot. But there's a lot more back and forth now

Brian Cronin: Ah, gotcha. Sort of like the old EC system, where they were lettered before the art was drawn.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, sort of like that

Brian Cronin: So basically, Ryan, you just have carte blanche in trying to come up with a visual for the character?

Ryan Dunlavey: Fred gives a TON of visual reference and he always has great suggestions

Fred Van Lente: "Make it look better." "Draw more like Todd McFarlane." I specialize in helpful, constructive criticism

Ryan Dunlavey: He came up with the idea for using the cartoon characters to represent animators in our new series. THE COMIC BOOK HISTORY OF ANIMATION - out this week!

Ryan Dunlavey: Reference is invaluable. It makes the job so much easier. Inventing visuals is HARD

Brian Cronin: Oh, I can only imagine, especially something like this. Where you have to come up with a new visual hook every other panel.

Ryan Dunlavey: Especially when I'm basically drawing an establishing shot with every panel, and characters only show up for a handful of pages rather than the whole series

Brian Cronin: One of the most amazing aspects of all of your Action/Comic Book History stuff has been how insane it must be to come up with the visuals that work for the historical aspect while still being engaging as an individual panel.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah, plus these histories seem to sadly always be dominated by white men, which gets real boring real fast.

Fred Van Lente: That is part of the motivation to "cast" real figures as recognizable cartoon characters. The comparison I always make is to political cartooning, who similarly have to come up with one-panel summations of heady stuff every day. Or they did, when there were newspapers In many ways, doing it for philosophy made it easier. Abstract concepts lend themselves rather easily to visualization.

Ryan Dunlavey: Yeah we can stretch the reality a lot more. I think in that respect our naturally wiseassness has been very helpful.

when it doubt, make fun of it.

Fred Van Lente: Indeed.

Fred Van Lente: Eventually, though, we solicited reader opinion about which philosophers to do. That's how we got St. Thomas Aquinas, and Kierkegaard, and some others. We ran out of "theme" issue ideas by #6, more or less, so that came in handy.

Brian Cronin: What was the feedback to #1 like from philosophers? I imagine they got a kick out of it. Were there any major critiques?

Fred Van Lente: Pretty much unanimous praise from philosophers, honestly. Almost...suspiciously so.

Ryan Dunlavey: I think it was mostly good

Brian Cronin: It's got to be a pretty cool thing for them to be able to show a comic book based on their work.

Fred Van Lente: There is only one actual criticism I remember getting, that was about the Rabbi Luria story, the one about The Kabbalah. But that was pretty mild. It was a disputation about a connection between the creation of the Hasidim and the Kabbalah, but at the time I remember thinking the guy hadn't actually read the passage correctly, but as Ryan said, that was a while ago.

Fred Van Lente: Honestly, almost entirely in the non-fiction stuff, people are excited you're doing comics about it, they tend to be forgiving. Even if they find errors, they tend to bring it up in a very kind way. The douchebags stick to one-star Amazon reviews, they don't really get in our faces, whcih is fine with me

Ryan Dunlavey: We get complaints about not including enough women philosophers, which I think is fair, but also we lost interest in the subject years ago

Fred Van Lente: There are people who think that the purpose of history is hagiography, that all of culture is propaganda for a particular worldview. I'd like to think that's exactly not the kind of history we practice. I prefer to talk about things as they did actually happen, not what should have happened, or anything like that. We try to do it with humor and empathy, and the comics medium, and Ryan's art style, really lends itself to that. Also, with farts. Farts always help

Brian Cronin: History as it actually did happen...plus farts. That's the summation of your work.

Fred Van Lente: It will be on my tombstone. If I had a tombstone.

Ryan Dunlavey: Carve it on my tombstone

Ryan Dunlavey: Dammit, Fred. See, we have the same brain.

Fred Van Lente: My plan is to spontaneously combust in the woods. Disappear like DB Cooper

Fred Van Lente: Ryan, it can be on your memorial in Greenwood Cemetery. A giant stone fart. Marble

Ryan Dunlavey: I'll start designing it now

Fred Van Lente: The Taj Mahfart. In fine print it will say "DunLAvey not DunLEAvy." If you say it wrong, the statue farts on you but of course that just encourages people to say it wrong. Maybe I need to rethink this strategy.

Brian Cronin: I just noticed that the Nietzsche story has an SPX joke in it. That's awesome.

Fred Van Lente: I am not surprised.

Ryan Dunlavey: And we still didn't get in!

Fred Van Lente: The proceeds of that anthology went to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, but the proceeds of Action Philosophers went right into our POCKETS. Sweet revenge.

Brian Cronin: And we were all the better for it! Thanks for talking about this with us, Fred and Ryan!

Brian Cronin: Happy Fred Van Lente Day, all!