Comic Book Men’s Ming Chen talks Season 5, Comics, Nerd Culture and Canada.
Comix Asylum’s Peter Van Horne had the chance to talk with Ming Chen about the 5th season of Comic Book Men, which kicks off October 18 (Midnight on AMC).
MC: Great to meet you, I assume you’re from Canada as well?
PVH: Yes, in Toronto as well speak.
MC: I love Canada. Let me start off by saying I love poutine, I love Porter airlines and I especially love Degrassi Junior High.
PVH: (laughs) That’s awesome. I know you’re a Baltimore Orioles fan.
MC: I am.
PVH: Any thoughts on today’s playoff game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers?
MC: You know? I’ve never really been a Rangers fan, so I’d like to see Canadians rise again like back in the day with Joe Carter, John Olerud. Yeah, I’m pulling for the Jays and I guess the Cubs in some capacity.
PVH: I think you’ve endeared yourself to more fans in Canada so that’s awesome.
MC: (laughs) That’s my goal in life.
PVH: Now you are at New York Comic Con as we speak.
MC: I am literally right out in front, the madness is right in front of me, and we just spent an hour podcasting on a bus driving around New York City with a bunch of fans and Kevin Smith and the rest of the Comic Book Men.
PVH: That’s awesome. Are you guys doing a panel for Comic Con as well?
MC: We finished that about an hour ago and that’s the thing that gets me, we go into those things and it’s packed – you know, like two or three thousand people. It means a lot to me that that many people care and watch the show. All the people there, they called off work to be there, so it’s pretty cool.
PVH: How important is it for you and the guys to interact with fans at the Cons you attend?
MC: It’s hugely important to me, there are a couple of reasons. One, you always want to hang out with people who watch the show. I mean, they are your life blood; if they don’t watch the show there is no show. And I love doing the show, I want to keep it going. Two, when I was young, maybe not that long ago, I was reading comic books, I was into comic books I was into sci-fi, and was into a lot of stuff that wasn’t popular for people to publicize they were fans of.
So it was hard for me to find other people to talk to about things like James Cameron’s Aliens movie, or the Atari 2600, or video games, and Batman. It was hard for me to find people to talk to about that, you didn’t really make it public. It wasn’t really all that cool, but now it’s everybody, so I relish that chance to find people that are into the same stuff that I am. And now there are whole Cons for these things where 90,000 – 100,000 like-minded people show up and you feel like you’re at home. So that’s pretty cool.
Even if I wasn’t on a TV show about comics I would be going to a lot of these Cons anyway. So it’s nice to be on the other side of the table, it’s nice to be invited where they want you to attend, they’ll get you out there and be a guest. It’s a lot of fun for me, I love it.
PVH: It’s amazing geek/nerd culture and cosplay have hit the mainstream where as you said it was once it was a subculture. I think it’s a fantastic thing, not only for you and the boys at Comic Book Men, but me and the guys at Comix Asylum. We’re all doing the same thing, we talk about comics and TV, film and sci-fi and it’s wonderful that it’s hit the mainstream, perhaps a little later than when we were teens.
MC: Like I tell everybody, guys like me and you we’re just ahead of our time. We knew from the first time we cracked open a comic book or bought that bootleg VHS tape or – I don’t know if you go as far back as the laserdisc – we knew that director commentaries and deleted scenes and DVD extras and all that were things that I wanted to talk to other people about. It’s not a barred wasteland anymore; I can turn and – literally there are two dudes dressed as Mario and Luigi walking right by me
PVH: (laughs) It’s funny you mentioned laserdiscs and VHS tapes as technology has allowed people access to what was once a very exclusive domain. The podcasts that you and the boys do wouldn’t have been available twenty years ago. What are your thoughts about how technology has changed? It seems to have taken away from the DVD extras you would find on special edition discs ten years ago and isn’t as popular as it once was.
MC: Yeah, I think for me with on-demand video the release of so much information and the easier way of interacting with people is something I appreciate so much. This is stuff we didn’t have a lot of access to growing up. It’s like a starving man at a buffet and where once you couldn’t get a crumb of something now it’s all out there and it’s just so much fun. Technology allows a show like Comic Book Men to thrive; a lot of people watch it on AMC but thank goodness for Netflix. A lot of people caught it on there as well, so whoever invented it, thank you.
PVH: Speaking of the show, Comic Book Men season 5 premieres on October 18 midnight on AMC. What can we expect for this upcoming season?
MC: Each season we’re trying to be like The Six Million Dollar Man, you know; bigger, better, faster, stronger. One thing I am really excited about is we have Peter Mayhew, who plays Chewbacca in Star Wars, on the show. Which is pretty cool, he is in the upcoming Star Wars Episode Seven – The Force Awakens, But more importantly, he was the guy I grew up watching in a dark theatre with my dad watching Star Wars when I was four years old. This is the space werewolf, the Wookie, the co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon. It’s crazy that 35-36 years later I got to meet him; he came down to the store and he does something that is pretty cool, pretty unique on the show. For a man over seventy years old, he just had double knee surgery and he walked around the store with a lightsaber cane, which was pretty cool. But he is still as personable and funny as ever.
PVH: You’ve had quite a few people on the show in the past – Gene Simmons, Neal Adams, Denny O’Neill.
MC: Yeah, a lot of people I never though I would ever meet or, you can meet guys like Neal Adams and Jim Lee – who is on the show this year – at conventions, but you get a few seconds, maybe a few minutes with them. So it’s really cool to have them in the store, where we get talking for an hour or so. These guys are all legends, as well as Stan Lee and Billy Dee Williams, and without these people we would not have Comic Cons or Comic Book Men or Comic Books and superheroes, and there wouldn’t be geek culture and cosplay.
PVH: For sure, those guys set the trail that everyone else walks upon.
MC: Yeah, God bless them and I thank them, have always thanked them and will continue to thank them.
PVH: Who hasn’t passed buy the Stash that you would love to have visit?
MC: If you haven’t gathered by now I’m a huge Star Wars fan, so I would love to see George Lucas, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, anyone from Episode Four who is still with us – Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker. That movie didn’t just change my childhood it changed my adult life.
PVH: It certainly set the standard for storytelling, for briging myth into movies, as well as technical and special effects.
MC: Absolutely, and comic book-wise, one of my favourite writers out now is Bryan K. Vaughan who does Saga, Y the Last Man, I believe he wrote a couple of episodes of Lost.
PVH: What it’s like doing the show? How long to shoot a typical episode and how long afterward do you do the podcast?
MC: We shoot everything over two months or so, during the summer here in New Jersey. The way it works with people bringing stuff in and trying to sell it we shoot for about two weeks, then Kevin (Smith) will come in and we talk about all the stuff we just shot over those previous two weeks, then he’ll leave then wash, rinse and repeat. So we do it two or three times, they cut it together and we have about thirteen episodes filmed. And it’s fun, me and the guys sit around arguing about stupid Back to the Future plot points anyways, so now we’re just doing it with cameras in front of us and it gets released to a wide audience. I never knew this before, but a lot of people love watching nerds and geeks sitting around talking about meaningless pop culture. It seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people, so thank goodness we got a whole show out of it.
PVH: There’s a resonance with the audience because they do the exact same thing in their local pub or somewhere they hang out but now it’s presented on a large stage.
MC: Exactly, and now that they see us doing it, I think it validates it a little bit, and they think “well these guys are doing it and they are much uglier than we are so we must be doing something right” (laughs).
PVH: The guys give you a bit of a hard time on the show – is most of that for TV or does the good-natured ribbing continue off screen as well?
MC: I get that question a lot, and in real life it’s actually worse. (laughs) In real life there is no editing, and Bryan is raunchier. A lot of the stuff he says for the show gets cut out, its too hot for television. (laughs) He’s a great jokester with great comedic timing, but a lot of his jokes won’t make it on air, I don’t even think it would be acceptable on HBO or Showtime. I’ve known Bryan and Walt almost twenty years now and they’ve been making fun of me since day one. I’ve grown a very thick skin and it bounces off me – usually. Some of it hits pretty hard, but it’s very rare. I just have to nod my head and say, “that was a good one, it was at my expense but I’ll give it to you, that was funny”.
PVH: Last year Comix Asylum spoke with Mike and he said you two were working on a book and record harkening back to the ‘70s – can you tells us more about it? How far along are you?
MC: Yeah, he wanted to go back to the days of the story book and 7” record that you used to follow along with. I have passed the writing tasks onto him, where I would contribute some other things but I think he is still writing it. That is something that is very old school that he would like to do. I think it’s going to take a little while, I think the writing duties are more than he anticipated.
PVH: But it is a cool idea now that vinyl is making a comeback.
MC: Yes, absolutely. And we know a few celebrity guest voices we could have come and do that record, that would be fun.
PVH: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and I wish you and the boys great success for the show this coming season.
MC: Thank you, I appreciate it.
Comic Book Men Returns October 18 on AMC
