I can vividly remember reading the first issue of “The Strange Talent of Luther Strode.” I remember getting to the shop early that day to look for that florescent tinged cover of a beast sized man splattered with blood and donningg one of the coolest designs for a mask I had seen. I texted my friend about the comic that featured a guy spiting their own tooth through someone’s eye. The book practically opens on a full spread page of absolute carnage. All this is just a small part in a story that was about a boy with no power suddenly coming into possession of almost unlimited power and what that meant. It was Spider-Man meets Tarantino. It was my new favorite comic.
Since that first issue Luther Strode used The Hercules Method and become a legend and, ultimately, created a legacy. Like Luther’s journey from an unknown high school student to a god-like entity, there was a similar growth for the team behind the series who for the “Strode” series was their first real work in comics. Creators Justin Jordan, Tradd Moore, and Felipe Sobreiro released issue one of “The Strange Talent of Luther Strode” on October 5, 2011. Since then, in addition to completing the Luther Strode trilogy, all three creators have worked on titles at Marvel, DC, Image, Boom and many more publishers and many more series. Luther Strode was their very own Hercules Method, as they all evolved and grew as creators into 3 major players in the comic world.
Now 6 years later, Justin, Tradd, and Felipe get ready to release the “Luther Strode: The Complete Collection.” This hardcover will collect all three series together for the first time. To learn more about this collection and their experience with Luther Strode we were able to talk to Justin, Tradd, and Felipe. This October also marks 6 years from my first comic related interview and it just happened to be with Tradd about Luther Strode. I am not sure I have gotten as good at interviews as they are at comics, but below you will find our in-depth look at Luther Strode and their time together on the series. Be sure to look for the “Luther Strode: The Complete Collection” in stores this October 11th.
First off thanks again so much guys for taking the time to talk about this collection and for making “Luther Strode” and sharing it with us all! What was the experience like putting together this Luther Strode collection and now seeing all your hard work together in one collection? Is this the first time you have really looked back at the series as a whole at all?
Tradd Moore: Putting this book together was both more work and more satisfying than I anticipated. Respect to all the book designers out there, and a heartfelt THANK YOU to the amazing Drew Gill who designed “Luther Strode: The Complete Collection” as well as all the other Luther Strode comics and volumes since the beginning of the series.
As for revisiting “Luther Strode,” I’ve gone back through the volumes countless times over the years, because a) I like being intimately familiar with my own comics, creations, art, etc. b) I’m obsessive, and c) “Luther Strode” has a ton of blood in it, and it is awesome. It was, however, the first time I had read all three volumes in sequence as a whole, and it was a blast. On a personal level, Luther Strode is like a journal for me. I remember where I was in my life—mentally, physically, emotionally—when I look at each panel and page.
Justin Jordan: Weird. Unlike Tradd, I mostly DON’T read my own stuff. And this was actually the first time I’ve read it all in sequence as well. So it was strange. Not bad, but strange. I was actually really happy that I still dug the thing.
But it was also kinda bittersweet. Because while we’ve been finished for a while, this felt even more final. And given how much the book has meant to me – it’s literally the most life changing thing that’s ever happened to me – that sense of finality is something I feel.
Continued belowEven though it’s not, you know, REAL. We easily could do more “Strode,” if we wanted to.
Felipe Sobreiro: It’s very rewarding to be able to have this book finally out! Fans have been asking for this hardcover since before we were done with the series and now they (and us!) can finally have the whole thing in their hands. I’m very happy.
What will this collection contain? Will it have all the amazing pin ups and back matter? Justin’s wrap ups? Bonuses?
TM: Tons of stuff! In addition to the main story, we have 60+ pages of bonus material in here including: variant covers, poster & promo art, character designs, a full script, our original pitch packet to Image, and guest pin-ups. Some of this you may have seen before, some of it I can guarantee that you haven’t.
It’s also oversized, so that’s a bonus in and of itself readers looking to gander at all the coiled intestines and severed heads in greater clarity.
JJ: Yeah, we tried to have as much stuff no one has really seen in there as we could. It’s not EVERYTHING “Strode” related, as cool as that would have been, because the stuff we did include come out to a pretty monstrous 544 pages.
My wrap ups aren’t in there. Those were always intended to be a little bonus for the people who bought the singles. So if you want to see what I said that’s gotten me years of hate mail from Star Wars fans, you will still need to track down the singles.
FS: Although, if you only buy this book, you’d be getting the perfect “Luther Strode” experience, so to speak, it’s all here and then some.
How have you guys evolved as creators since working on that very first issue of the series?
TM: “Luther Strode” was the first published comic I drew. I was operating on pure passion, and very little know-how. Art for the series starts way back in Summer 2009 where I was a tender 21 and stretches its spidery fingers 8 years across time to now, Summer 2017, where I’m a tempered 29, a gnarled old scoundrel with bent bones and crooked rat teeth. I still got starry-eyes, though.
It’s hard to describe the artistic changes one undergoes in 8 years; luckily art speaks for itself. Our growth is revealed in blood soaked, crimson glory with every page turn. Flip through the book and you’ll see our creative evolution unfold in front of you!
JJ: Oh man, I don’t even have a good answer. I think I’m a more confident writer now, for sure. I don’t know that “Strange Talent of Luther Strode” Justin would have had the guts to write something as sprawling as “Legacy” ended up being.
I can say we evolved considerably as a creative team since we started. The first series was a lot more “Justin writes the script and Tradd draws it” than we subsequently became. We all work well together and we’ve worked a lot together, so the creative process as a whole has become a lot more free style.
FS: I got to agree with the guys, “Luther Strode” is truly a watershed moment in our careers and it’s also a portrait of our evolution as a creative team. As we reviewed the book I went back through the whole thing and it’s really fun to see the seed of the project start very humbly in the first issue of “The Strange Talent” and expand through the years until the last issue of “Legacy,” where not only the scope of the plot itself is much more ambitious but the visual storytelling itself matured a lot.
What is the biggest thing you learned or took away from your experience creating this series?
TM: Beyond the obvious things I learned artistically (how to draw a comic, for example, which is a never ending learning process), and about how to function as a working artist (Pace yourselves, creators. Make an effort to discover and set your personal boundaries. Learn how to communicate your needs and desires to collaborators and employers. Try to find happiness in your art, or else what’s the point? Take a deep breath and remember… it’s just a fuckin’ drawing) and the things I took away and value personally (friendship with my highly estimable Strode-mates Justin and Felipe), I’d say…
Continued belowYeah, I’d say those are the most valuable take-aways.
JJ: The value of picking the right partners. We got realllllllly lucky with “Strode.” It’s not just that Tradd and Felipe were perfect for the book, although that’s true, but also that we work together well. And you know, LIKE each other.
And that’s way more important than, I think, I realized at the outset. For one thing, barring legal intervention, a creative partnership like this is forever. I mean, even if we never work together again, the IP we already created exists, so we’re connected. It’s really, really good that none of us are assholes.
FS: Luck played a part because as Justin said one of us could’ve been hard to work with, and no matter how good the work may be, if you can’t have a smooth relationship with a creative partner, then the process becomes a chore and you’d be better off doing something else. Making comics as a living is hard enough as it is, you got to work with people you can communicate easily and naturally.
And also, the “Luther Strode” saga may be done but we all really enjoyed working together, and we intend to keep working as a team down the road, with wild new projects we’re slowly cooking!
When you guys began working on that first issue what were your expectations for the issue and that first mini series? Had you guys even discussed the series as a trilogy at that time?
JJ: Haha, we had no expectations. I mean that pretty literally. I told Tradd and Felipe not to expect to make any money, but if we got the six issues down we’d have the trade, and that would be something.
I was, and I am very happy about this, dead wrong, but I think that’s basically how you need to look at things. I just had the same talk with the creative team on “The Family Trade.” I hope the book makes money, and mine always have, knock on wood, but I think you need to be clear eyed about the possibility of failure.
The trilogy thing happened before the first issue was out. It wasn’t that we expected to be able to do it, but we realized there was a story we could tell if we got the opportunity TO tell it. And it actually ended up being more or less the story we told.
TM: Yep, what Justin said, no expectations, no delusions of grandeur. I didn’t believe “Strode” would get picked up by a publisher in the first place, much less by IMAGE.
I had drawn a number of comic pitches in college prior to and following our “Luther Strode” pitch and none of them went anywhere. They were all either turned down or I never got a response. At that time I saw pitch packets as practice, and they were great for me in that capacity. So I thought, “Eh, these pitches may not go anywhere, but they build my skills and portfolio, and I need to be producing pages anyway, so I’ll keep cranking ‘em out.” I used pitches as art assignments at The Savannah College of Art and Design–I penciled the Strode pitch for fun during Summer ‘09, and I inked the pitch as an assignment for my Intro to Inking class the following Fall quarter.
I drew the Strode pitch nearly a year before we got Felipe on board to color it and sent it to Image, so by that time I had already written it off as another one down the drain. When it got picked up I straight up didn’t believe it. I kept reading over the email like, “Is this a prank? Is someone messing with me? That thing I drew a year ago got the green light?!”
So, as it turns out, pitches sometimes do work, so keep on pitching!
FS: We did only a few pages for the pitch, plus the cover, and sent it blindly. I didn’t have a lot of hope, back then I had been part of some pitches (and have been since then as well) and most of the times you just don’t hear anything back and have to assume the worst. Justin already had the idea for the six issues but I think that everything beyond that was still very nebulous and vague back then.
Continued below
What are each of your favorite moments from that book and also favorite moment that came from creating or being part of this series?
JJ: Honestly, and it’s a small moment, but the drugged dude Luther launched as a human missile going, “‘M flyin’” is probably still my favorite bit. A close runner up is Samson slaughtering a thousand dudes with the jawbone of an ass, where Tradd decided, as far as I can tell, to actually draw a thousand dudes.
TM: Ha! I love both of those as well, Justin.
For me I’d say that “The Legacy of Luther Strode” issues 3-6 are my favorite parts of the series. I’d say the entirety of “The Legacy of Luther Strode,” but that might be cheating. I love the characters and environments we created in those issues. It felt like designing my very own Street Fighter or Tekken game. I love that the issues are enjoyable outside of any context. I love good fight scenes, and I think we put together great fight scenes throughout The Legacy. I love good choreography and character movement, and that’s what these issues were all about. They’re the most artistically satisfying issues for me; they’re just fun to look at. They’re distillations of my favorite things to draw, read, watch, and play. They’re like a fighting game meets a martial arts movie, meets an anime, meets a dance recital, meets the Olympics, meets a “bottle episode”, meets Rocky, meets an 80’s Schwarzenegger movie, all told as an American comic book.
The back half of “The Legend of Luther Strode,” issues 4-6, holds a special place in my heart too. It’s a three issue long fight scene/chase scene/cat and mouse game between Luther, Petra, Jack the Ripper, and Binder. Jack was one of my favorite characters to draw from the series.
FS: It’s hard to pick a favorite moment from the book, but I think the most rewarding of the three series, as a whole, was Legacy. I talked the guys into doing drastic, overt changes in palette from issue to issue, and I think it really paid off in a fun way.
Talking to you guys in interviews, seeing you at cons, and reading the write ups in back along with the back up stories everything seemed to point to you guys having a great working relationship and fun making this book together. What was it like working with each other on the series over the years? What did each person bring to the story that no one else could of?
JJ: It’s probably been the best working relationship I’ve had, and most of them have been pretty good, so getting to the top takes some doing. But Tradd and Felipe and I realized early on that we think almost identically about how to tell stories, which really helps. But we’re mostly on the same page about most things, so it’s worked out really well.
I think the biggest ‘argument’ we had was about Luther’s shoes in “Legacy,” and by argument, I mean not an actual argument at all, just a rare case where we had to talk about something rather than just using the hivemind.
TM: I still love those goddamn shoes, JUSTIN.
Yeah, I couldn’t hope for a better team relationship than we had on this series. Working with both these guys is a great time, through and through. Even when you like a creator’s work or you like them personally, you may not click as a creative team, but this is one of those situations where we click across the board. I trust them, and that’s paramount.
As for what we each brought to the story, it’s tough to separate. The fact of the matter is that the series was created by the three of us as a team, and it simply doesn’t exist in any other way. So what we each brought to the book is what you see, and it couldn’t be anything else.
Also, let’s not forget the fourth member of Team Strode, letterer extraordinaire Fonografiks. He did an amazing job lettering the series and was a pleasure to work with. I distinctly remember when we first received a PDF of the first issue with Fonografiks’ lettering and all three of us were collectively blown away. Luther Strode wouldn’t look or feel like Luther Strode without his top notch work.
Continued belowFS: It’s just so fun and satisfying to work with these guys. Not only they’re nice people, but they’re also so damn good at what they do!
Now with it all collected in one edition and having the ability to look at it as one complete story is there anything any of you would have changed about the series?
TM: Not a dang thing! Actually, we found a few tiny mistakes in the art and corrected them for this volume (ex: we accidentally forgot Petra’s tattoos in one big panel), but other than that… not a dang thing!
For me, it’s all about forward motion. Any mistakes you make along the way, you learn from those and do better in future work, but there’s no point in looking back and agonizing over, “Oh, I should have made my character do this! I should have made my character say that!” Move on, make a new story.
JJ: Nope. I think I’m probably a better writer, overall, than when I started, but even reading it again while putting this together. There’s stuff I could, I guess, do differently, but nothing I think I could have done BETTER, which is a pretty important distinction to me.
FS: No, and that’s the point of having it all in one big book. The first pages of Strange Talent are nothing like the final pages of Legacy. But we always did the best work we could do at that moment in time. I think I’m doing my best work nowadays, but in five years I’ll look back and clearly see what I’d do differently. There’s never going to be a perfect, definitive stage of completion.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of the series was seeing Luther’s growth and evolution from “Talent,” “Legend,” and “Legacy?” Essentially you are the 3 men and Luther Strode baby and as his caretakers how was it seeing and guiding his growth as a character? Who was Luther by the end of the series?
JJ: I think by the end, Luther finally became the person he wanted to be all along. I am sure Luther would have preferred a less horrifying path to get there. But it was nice seeing him finally get to a good place, despite all the shit he went through.
Luther is, fundamentally, a guy who believes in doing the right thing and standing up for those weaker than him. That was true in the first one, but what he’s learned is about the far reaching impacts of what he does.
Which, you know, I think is growing up for anyone. Assuming you do grow up – some people manage not to. But a big part of adulthood is realizing that shit is complicated and what you do echoes through your life.
I also like that Luther is an idealist but not a fool. Yes, he WANTS the Bound and company to stop being evil. He also realizes that they need to be put down if they won’t change.
TM: Yep, I’d agree with all that.
On my end, I used Luther’s appearance as a visual guide to his character growth. Each change he undergoes internally affects in his appearance and often his environment in some way. That was one of my favorite elements of developing Luther’s character from issue to issue. There’s intention in each scene, and I hope readers have a good time looking for details about Luther’s character on his person and in his surroundings. Who Luther is throughout the series, and how he feels about himself, and where he ends up is right there on the pages.
The second, or maybe first for others, most fulfilling aspects of the series were the insane fight sequences and just absurd levels of gore and violence. Every panel, move and decapitation felt like it had purpose and was crafted with care. What was the process like building out those scenes as a team?
JJ: LOOOOTS. Probably more than anything else. The book is, after all, fundamentally a fight comic. So from issue to issue in any series we considered how we were playing out the violence – everything needs to build, to get bigger and bigger towards the climax. That was true of the arc to arc build as well.
Continued belowBut even on the level of individual fights, the back and forth of how the fight went, and what we depicted or didn’t was really carefully measured. The general way it went was that I’d write the fight scenes, and that was choreographed panel by panel – mostly because I LIKE writing fight scenes, and then Tradd would go over it and add and subtract and change stuff until we got something that worked.
That’s simplifying a bit – by the time we did “Legacy” we were co-writing, so the process wasn’t as me oriented as that sounds, but we basically did a lot of work on getting it right and we ended up doing stuff as a team that’s better than anything I could have come up with.
TM: Yeah, coming up with ridiculous depictions of gore and choreographing fight scenes together was 100% the most fun part of the series for me. Fight scenes and tongue-in-cheek hyper gore was my artistic MO for a long time, maybe it still is to a degree, but yeah, when Justin first found my work, that was pretty much all I drew. He knew he’d found the right guy!
As Justin mentioned, in “The Strange Talent” we all stayed in our creative lanes–Justin writes, I draw, Felipe colors. There’s a ton of freedom and creativity in each of those lanes, mind you, and we all continuously surprised each other with what we came up with, but it got even better and more collaborative as we got further into the series.
Justin and I came up with a lot of the big fight scenes and set pieces while hanging out at cons or signings. We’d be in our hotel room or wherever spitballing ideas for hours, “OH, and they could fight on a skyscraper! Oh, and that guy can have cowboy guns! The whole issue will be like a John Woo movie!” It was great. I remember having dinner in a mall in Virginia when we came up with the idea of the Luther Vs. Jack mall fight. I based the mall from the issue on that place. So yeah, scenes typically started as big, fun ideas that we would carefully sculpt into reality.
By the time we got to Legacy, Justin and I were doing a lot of “pass the script”. Justin would write an initial draft of each issue that I would sketch out and adjust in places, then I’d send an annotated draft and thumbnail sketches back to him. He’d tweak it more, adjust dialogue, back and forth, back and forth, until it was fully fleshed out and we were both happy with it. I think it was more work for us both this way, but it was cool.
The back ups I loved as the series continued we got to see back ups that featured both Tradd and Felipe tackling different creative roles. How did this idea come about? Also why did we never see a back up drawn by Justin?
JJ: Well, Tradd and Felipe are gifted creators in any number of disciplines. Tradd is a very good writer, and Felipe is a very fine artist beyond his colors (he drew an entire issue of “Spread,” for instance) and so it made sense to have them do more stuff.
I, on the other hand, am good at exactly one thing. Indeed, my drawings are so bad that had I attempted to draw a backup we stood a high chance of summoning the Nethergods of the Unrealm to reap the planet.
Which probably would have hurt sales.
TM: Yeah, it’s fun to try on different hats, and back-up material is a great place for that. We all knew Felipe was a multi-talented artist, so when he offered to illustrate back covers for the series, it was a no brainier. Of course! I love all the art Felipe created for the series, and it’s all included in the “Complete Series” hardcover.
As for the (indefinitely unfinished) back-up story, “The Twins,” that I wrote, Stephen Green drew, Felipe colored, and Fonografiks lettered, that one came together pretty naturally. Justin and I wanted to have a back-up story span the whole “Legacy” series. Stuff like that can make a fictional world feel bigger, and it allows you to spotlight different characters from the series. When you’re creating characters, you often come up with bigger stories about them than you ever end up telling in the main story, and that was the case here. While designing “The Twins,” the duo Luther fights in “The Legacy of Luther Strode” #1 who were created to be a subtle shoutout to Ken and Ryu from Street Fighter, I came up with an uncomfortable story about their lives and background that I thought was cool, so that’s what we went with.
Continued belowBeyond that, we wanted to spotlight and work with an (at the time) up and coming artist, the incredible Stephen Green. Stephen has since gone on to draw issues of “Hellboy and the BPRD,” “Lobster Johnson,” and “The Beauty,” and he has another insanely cool project in the works that I’ll keep my mouth shut about. He was up and coming in 2014… now he’s fuckin’ THERE! So yeah, we didn’t finish “”The Twins,” but Stephen was able to use the work as a fun stepping stone in his path to much bigger and better things, so I’ll always consider the exercise a huge success. Congrats Stevo! Friends forever!
FS: I started working in comics as an illustrator, before quickly moving into coloring (I still want to draw my own comic, I’ve even pestered Justin for scripts). When we were discussing what to feature in the back covers of “The Strange Talent” way back when, I sort of floated the idea that I would be able to come up with something on my own and I was glad the guys were happy to see what I’d do. Early on, most of the back covers I came up with were “Watchmen”-style “extras”, like reproducing a handwritten note that Pete placed in Luther’s locker, a news clipping or a coroner’s report, fun things like that to expand a little bit the story. By the time we were doing Legacy, I suggested doing movie poster tributes. And yes, they’re all featured in the hardcover!
After the first series got the praise it did and deserved. I remember wondering how you guys would top that first arc that felt as close to a perfect comic as there was for me personally. How was it working on the second series with the new expectations and then to also have a third and final series that had its own unique expectations as the final chapter of the saga?
JJ: Difficult. The second one probably less than the third. It was weird, having that pressure, which I definitely felt. For me, there’s always a certain amount of ‘Can I pull this off?” on every project, but one as well received as Strode when I was still a relatively new writer was a lot of pressure.
But we had a solid plan for how the book would go. We were by design doing a book that was a somewhat different genre – “Strange Talent” was, I think, best described as superhero horror, and “Legend” was more crime horror. So setting out to do a different thing was a psychological sort of relief, I think.
The third one was tougher for me. Not because of any story related thing. But because this was the last one (although, again, it was us who made decision, so I got no one to blame) it was hard. I kept procrastinating. Just starting it was tough. Writing it wasn’t so bad, but the lead up was murder.
On the other hand, I’ve got this…I call it the zen thing, which is probably insulting to zen….thing, where I do the best work I can, put it out, and move on. It’s one of the reasons, aside from having a cat to feed, I work so much – I have so much to do I can’t afford the time to brood and worry. So that helped.
TM: In general, yeah, facing up against expectations is tough, especially your own. It’s a paradox creators have to wrestle with: you have to completely care and completely not care about expectations at the same time. You have to be aware of genre tropes and expectations in order to tell a fresh story, but you don’t want to be purely reactionary, and you don’t want to just jettison everything. Tropes are what make people like specific genres in the first place and keep them coming back for more.
With “Luther Strode,” the whole thing is a love letter to genre fiction, so we’re using a toolbox full of tropes and archetypes. Some of them we flip, some we expand upon, some we joke about, some we revel in. For me, it’s mostly revelling, haha. It’s a fun game to play with an audience who knows genre tropes as well as you do. “What does this remind me of? Is this going to go how I think this is going to go? Or is it a bluff? Or is it a double bluff? How do I even want it to go?” Like Justin mentioned, we shifted our genre focus from volume to volume, from slasher horror, to street level superhero crimefighter, to martial arts adventure, so that kept the whole thing fun and interesting to me creatively. We played with a different bag of tricks in each volume, so that allowed us to sidestep some expectations inherent to each genre we were celebrating.
Continued belowOn the other hand, expectations are bullshit. Obsessing over reception and perception is personally toxic and creatively paralyzing. It can absolutely suck the joy out of creating. That kind of thinking is more about ego and control than art and expression. Insecurities will inevitably bubble up, that’s natural, but you have to kick ‘em out. You have to. From the very first issue of Strode and with every comic I do, the basic idea is, “Do I love this? Do I think this is awesome?” If the answer is yes, yeah, I do it. Fuck whatever expectations people may or may not have. At the end of the day, it’s piece of fiction. It’s lines on a page. Nothing more, nothing less. You have to be you and make what you’re going to make, and let it mean whatever it means to whoever reads it.
FS: I think that all you have to do as a creator is be sure you’re making the best work you can, and let the readers decide if they like it when the thing’s done. You’ll never please everybody, but if you’re doing the best work you can, and you’re doing something that YOU would like to read, then the readers will hopefully come. Maybe I’m just saying this because last night was the Twin Peaks finale and Lynch is a great practitioner of this (to the extreme, even): don’t think about what people expect from your work. Do your best: that’s it.
Could you guys see yourself ever revisiting the series or any characters from that universe? Could you see another group of creators doing Luther stories or in universe stories? If so who are some creators you would love to see on the title?
TM: Yes and yes. To be clear, as the title of our upcoming collection, “Luther Strode: The Complete Series,” states, the “Luther Strode” series is indeed complete. Luther’s tale has been told. However, returning to the world in another capacity is an open and exciting option.
On returning to the series myself, I’d love to at some point, but in Avatar: The Last Airbender / The Legend of Korra fashion, by which I mean returning to the same world, but telling a new story with new, different characters at a different point in the world’s timeline.
On another group of creators doing in universe stories, absolutely. This would be amazing. I’d like to hire relatively unknown, under the radar, or underappreciated creators for this since that’s what “Luther Strode” was for us: a first big opportunity for a team of unknown creators to publish a comic for a wide audience. I’m not going to name names because I have my eyes on some artists for this exact purpose, and I don’t want to spoil anything in the event that we do proceed with something like this. So be aware fellow artists: my eyes are everywhere. *villainous cackle*
JJ: 100% what Tradd said. Luther and Petra’s story is done. The universe probably isn’t. I would love to make a spinoff with new creators happen, and we’ve had some talks about that, but it hasn’t quite materialized yet…YET.
Last question. Pete. Really?! It still hurts
FS: It’ll always hurt. Pete was the best.
TM: Fear not! Pete lives again each time you open “The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #1.”
JJ: …and he dies all over again every time you read issue five.
TM: Dangit, Justin.
