Matt Kindt Interview on “Mind MGMT” & More!

I had the great experience of interviewing Matt Kindt, creator ofMind MGMTand many, many more, and you can hear our full conversation on Comic Book Herald’s “Creannotators,” on thepodcast.

But since some people prefer the ancient art of “reading,” we’ve also transcribed the interview below, talking with Matt about his time on the great book, as well as what comes next from his Flux House imprint.The transcription has been slightly edited for clarity. Read and enjoy!

CBH:Today, we’re going to be talking about the launch of Matt’s new imprint at Dark Horse Comics,Flux House, which is going to be kicking off withMIND MGMT: Bootleg. The return of one of my favorite comic series of all time. I think I have it rankedsixth or fifth of all time right now. I reread it recently and we’re going to be talking about that series in a little bit as well as this line. Matt, let’s start here. First off, thanks so much for joining. Second, it feels like an era of creators setting up shop as their own mini publishers, with their own imprints. That’s definitely a trend that’s been happening. What for you is the appeal ofFlux House黑马的计划进行了多久了?

Kindt:我想我已经在这上面工作一年多了。我开始四处开发一些书籍，并对如何推广这些书籍以及我想要的设计有一些有趣的想法。比如，制作、设计和营销方面的各种奇怪的事情，我意识到我想做一些可以跨越所有书籍的事情。某种能让他们在怪异和独特中统一起来的东西。实际上，我认为这是因为我将其归咎于数字漫画，因为我开始在我的iPad上阅读漫画，因为它们看起来非常棒。你可以马上下载，我现在也很懒，不想出门，但是如果我可以马上下载并阅读，我就会想“哦，我就这么做吧。”它们看起来很棒，很明亮，所以我想，因为我太喜欢这些了，这让我质疑我在做什么。比如我为什么要写24页的周一漫画，我为什么要写漫画小说，我为什么要这样做?我需要想出一个理由让它们成为书，你知道吗?如果我想不出它们成为书的理由，那我就需要想清楚它们需要变成什么，比如会变成网络漫画吗? Is it going to be something you read on your phone?

And I do really still like books. I like having books on my shelf, I like walking by looking at books, remembering books just by looking at the spines and having that connection to stuff I’ve read in the past. And I realized that I was reading books on the Kindle for a while and then even on the iPad, you sort of forget what you’ve read. People will ask me “oh, what are you reading right now?” and then I’m like “oh no, I’ve just read like a hundred books, but they’re all in the computer or wherever, in a folder somewhere.” And so I don’t feel as connected to those. There’s a disconnect and so I really want to do books that had to be books. They’ll work great as comic books when they come out and we’ll collect them and then the books will be very special. They’ll have interesting covers or ways to interact with them. Something that you can’t get any other way.

CBH:Yeah, I love that. Okay, cool. I always found it interesting, rereadingMIND MGMT—I’ve got the nice field guide, omnibus editions so I had a chance to peruse those, which was super fun—and one thing that I’ve always loved about it is just creatively, structurally, like, you include messages in the gutters. But there’s a physicality to literally turning the book, like for the optimal reading experience, which I always thought it was sort of a digital destroyer because, if you do that on your iPad, it’s super annoying because your screen’s going to rotate. You know? So just little things like that that create that value in print. I love that. I love that idea that you’re incorporating it intoFlux反对令人信服的数字化阅读的理由，要有一个真正的目的，“好吧，如果我们要买这个印刷，我们为什么要这样做?”你过去做过一些事情，你说过一些非传统的销售方法，对吗?你已经做了记录，沿着记录读。I have a copy ofMIND MGMT. You’ve talked about doing a deck of cards. Some really innovative sort of things. What are your favorite nontraditional methods that you’ve done or you have down the pipeline for some of these?

Kindt:I think one of my favorites is the bookRed Handed, that I designed to have a page where I burn a corner of the page off, like when I sign the book, I get a lighter and I burn half the page and it sort of works with the page behind it, so the panel I’ve burned off reveals the text below, so when you’re reading that page with the burned page, you’re reading the text below it. And then you flip the page and then it changes the meaning of everything. Just by burning that corner off. So that’s probably my favorite thing.

And what happens is that I sit on ideas like that, and it really comes from that I really want to burn a page in a book. But not for no reason, so I have to sort of hang on to those impulses to do something weird and then wait until it fits the story. Because to me, it has to fit the story as well. It has to be part of the narrative in some way and the beauty withMIND MGMTis just the concept ofMIND MGMT. It’s sort of intruding on your world anyway. The idea is that it’s trying to make you feel paranoid while you’re reading this book, like am I getting everything? Is there secret messages? Because a lot of them are kind of obvious to see, so then you’re looking for them all over the place. So for me,MIND MGMTwas a perfect way to explore all these weird ideas of delivering story in unique ways and it’s still part of the theme, part of the story, part of the character.

CBH:Yeah. That’s cool. Did people ever freak out at cons when you took out a lighter to their comic?

Kindt:是啊。我办了一个新书发布派对在新书发布派对上，我做了一件事。我只做过一次，但这本犯罪书里有个小故事，Red Handed有一个小故事，一个人买了一幅名画，然后他把它切成100块，只卖其中的一部分，所以每个买它的人都知道“哦，我得到了这幅名画的一小块。”这样一来，他就可以把这幅画卖一百次，同时也可以把这幅著名的画卖掉，所以没有一个人是被盗艺术品的接受者，因为从某种程度上来说，这幅画已经被毁了。每个人都有一块。所以，我做了一个读书会，我做了一个现场读书会，当我这样做的时候，我画了一个大的图片，就像书中的一个图像，我计时，所以我画了整个东西，然后把它切成100块，然后签名，在签名结束时把它们分发出去。这很有趣，但当人们在后面排队时，我也把书烧掉了。我正在烧书，然后一个女人走过来——她是图书管理员——她说:“你不能烧我的书。”我试图解释这是故事的一部分，她说“不，不，不，你不能烧这本书。”她没有，所以这是唯一一次——可能是唯一一次——我没有做。

CBH:太好了。So, before we get intoFluxa little more and the tenants of the argument of what you’re trying to do, you mentioned in passing there that one thing you’re looking to do is connect your creator-owned works. That was actually something I was going to ask because inFear Case—the book you did as one of your projects with Tyler Jenkins, and you’ve done a ton of great books with Tyler and Hilary onGrass Kings, Black Badge, for example—there’s a reference to a novel by Philip Verge, which is super close to Phil Verve. So I was going to ask, are we teasing some crossover universe stuff? How onto that am I? Is that happening? Is that part of the plan here?

Kindt: Yeah, Philip Verge showed up inRevolver, it was for a book I did for Vertigo and he was sort of a reality hopping guy. He could pop in between universes. That was his whole thing. He could pop back and forth and use his knowledge of one universe to exploit another, so that was a self contained book, but then I kind of named him after a character that had showed up inTwo SistersorSuper Spyor in an earlier book, and I was like, oh, this is going to be that guy. He’s going to be my villain. Every book needs a villain. And I was like, I don’t know, but I kept plugging him in and plugging him in. So he was inRevolver, and then he showed up inMind MGMTas the husband of the main Eraser. She was kind of the villain, or whatever of that book. He shows up in there for a little bit and then I was like “oh, that makes sense,” because he’s popping into the other universes, so it makes sense for him to be in everything I do. You know? And sometimes he’s the main character, and sometimes he’s just a secondary or in the background, or he’s just referenced, but I like the idea that he’s a writer too. He’s a writer and he shows up as a main character inBANG!, the series I do with Wilfredo, so he’s the main character again in that and he’s more of an author figure there, but he’s the same character in all of it. And the interesting thing is that I changed his name to Verge because thatBANG!And then a couple ones that Scott [unclear] got and they’re developing the movie/TV versions, so if you’re going to optionBANG!, I thought, well, we might want to change his name because he’s inMIND MGMT，它正在其他地方开发用于电视，所以我不希望所有不同的人选择生气，“嘿，看!这就是我们的品格!说，不，不。他和任何人都不一样。他一直在找我茬，他什么地方都出现。所以我的解决办法是稍微调整一下他的名字，这样他现在每次出现的时候，他的名字都会有点不同，因为我想保持我的连续性，但我也不是在建立一个电影宇宙。不同的人有不同的选择。这有点不同。

CBH:That’s so cool. I love that. That’s funny because I readRevolverwell before I had readMIND MGMT, so I didn’t even make the connection. Now that you say it, I’m like, oh yeah, that wasn’t hidden! I should have recognized that!

Kindt:It’s alright! It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to care about it. Like, I love when people go through Tarantino’s universe and go “oh there’s a lot of overlap with those weird characters,” like I love that stuff, but also I’m too lazy to really figure it out or care about it, you know?

CBH:它就在那里!它只是。太棒了。Fluxus是一个真正的艺术运动。You’ve got people who’ve readMIND MGMT你参考了flux house，你参考了Marcel DuChamp, Salvador Dali。你知道，他们作为影响和艺术家是叙事的一部分。但这里也有真实的历史。随着Fluxus运动的发展，它会变得非常前卫，对吧?这种情况可能会非常严重，我很欣赏你在漫画和你的创作者所有的东西上所做的一件事，就是在可访问性和突破界限之间有一个很好的平衡。你想带着这个印记走多远?你想更进一步吗?这种风气会如何影响这些书呢?

Kindt是的，我要试着走剃刀边缘，穿针引线，不管是什么，因为我要尝试做一些从未有人做过的新事情。不是炫耀，而是因为我厌倦了。我已经做了20年了，所以我试图保持兴趣，所以我想以一种让我兴奋的形式或方式做一些事情，就像早上醒来，我迫不及待地画它，或者我迫不及待地设计它，或者弄清楚它如何工作的谜题。但是，我也喜欢各种类型的电影，所以可能会是犯罪故事，可能是科幻故事，也可能是恐怖故事，这些我还没做过很多。我写过一本恐怖小说，所以我想继续检查这个类型的东西，这是你想要的。你知道吗?当你读一本犯罪小说的时候，你会想要谋杀。所以我想这样做，但我也想用一种新的或有点奇怪的方式来做。对我来说，Fluxus的运动是关于改变，关于震撼观众，或者做一些非常不寻常的事情，我想做的是尝试把这些转变成一种叙事，所以你仍然会有一个开头，一个中间，和一个结尾，你会得到你关心的角色。但我们只是用一种有趣的稍微不同的方式来做。 I mean, just the way comics work is a crazy medium. It’s not prose, it’s not words, it’s not movies. It’s its own thing, so already, just making something a comic book is sort of making it strange.

CBH:当然。相对。So, I’m curious then, as you’re talking about different ways of designing things and different ways of keeping yourself engaged and doing new stuff, something that you’ve done recently withMIND MGMT你将故事扩展到了这款隐藏移动桌游中，这真是太棒了。我没有。我最近才看了一些视频，不知怎么的我错过了Kickstarter，现在我对这个东西很着迷。它看起来很酷。It reminds me, I have Chris Ware’sBuilding Stories, and it’s like that, but a game. When you’re doing something like that, do you view it as an extension of that universe, like, as an extension of that story? I guess I’ll pause there. Do you view it as that this is the next chapter, but it’s a boardgame?

Kindt:是的,肯定的。When I was doingMIND MGMT, I was doing a monthly book by myself and I was writing, drawing, coloring, lettering, doing the production, the design. There was no ads in the book, so the back covers, the inside-back covers, everything. There was nothing that didn’t show up in print that wasn’t something that I touched and put there. And I did that for three years and then when I was done, I was done. To me, it was like my perfect book. Everything I wanted to do was in there. I got to do it exactly how I wanted to do it. It was just everything. I wasn’t ever going to reboot it or restart it or, you know, do more of it. I’m done with that. I just wanted to do some other books, tell other stories. But, the problem was that after doing it for three years, I’m like, oh my god, I’m always thinkingMIND MGMT. It’s sort of brainwashed me into how I think about stories and characters and ideas.

So, every idea I was getting was like, oh, this would be a perfectMIND MGMTstory, but I wasn’t going to do that, so my solution was to just do stories, do the ideas, but do them in a different way every time. So, I did a book and record where you read along and then there’s a comic book and then you listen to the record, but then the record is supposed to read it to you, except what it’s actually reading to you is not what you’re seeing at all. It’s something different, so it works. It sort of subverts what you’re looking at. And then I put secret messages in it, so if you run it back, there’s a secret message. So, I did a story like that, I did a mini-comic with florescent ink. It was like a small run thing. And then I did the boardgame and I was like “this is great.” I see it as an extension in that it’s not just repeating the story of what I did, you know? It’s not like licensed stuff where it’s like “oh I’ve read this story and now here’s a game version of it,” I wanted it to be something that was, if you’d read everything, well here’s something extra, here’s a different story you can get, or now, here’s this game where it’s actually indoctrinating you and making you an agent ofMIND MGMT.

So the whole thing works as like a kit that you would get in the mail within the reality of the comic, where they would send you this game and the game is actually training you to be an agent. So, in my mind, that’s what it is. It’s like a real thing. It’s training you to be aMIND MGMT代理。我只是觉得我想继续讲故事，但我希望每次都以不同的形式呈现。我们做了一个桌面游戏，有一副带有美术的纸牌这是52副纸牌。这是一副标准牌，但每张牌都有不同的规则与角色联系在一起。你可以玩普通的游戏，也可以遵循这些规则，它会把你玩过的任何纸牌游戏都搞砸。这给了我写一系列书的另一个想法。我正在创作一系列的图画小说，迷你图画小说，它们是一副纸牌，你可以阅读，翻转，重新洗牌，这就改变了故事。我还能说什么?

CBH:Is that going to be coming out through theFlux Houseline?

Kindt:Yeah. I’m working on those now. The first one’s a time travel story and I should go get the map of it because the idea is that you read through it and then at the end, the guy goes back, changes something in time, and so you have to put the deck in a different order and the read it again. And so it’s so complicated. But I like the idea too having a book where you hold a deck of cards, it’s not too dissimilar from swiping on your phone and reading on your phone, but I liked having the deck of cards and you have to shuffle them again. Also, maybe they work as a deck of cards that you can repurpose those. Yeah, I thought that launching this new series, the long version of it is that I wanted to a launch and an imprint, I want people to be excited about it but maybe starting with something familiar. Like,MIND MGMT, people have read it, so you kind of know. Some people know it, some people have at least heard of it. So, we’ll start with that, but I didn’t want to write and draw another thing like normal, so I approached this like in its title,Bootleg，因为我想让其他的艺术家进来，让我觉得我并没有完全控制它，或者，其他的艺术家进来，做他们自己的版本，或者做一个非官方的续集。你知道，这不是续集，但它是一个官方版本，就像，我和黑马不完全容忍的版本。这就是我的想法。然后，它让我和一些我最喜欢的艺术家合作，让他们把他们的旋转。

CBH:是的,肯定的。这是很酷的。一共40期，从我们录制的一个月开始。你会说，如果人们想要购买它，他们是否需要阅读最初的运行?我再次强烈推荐它。I think it’s a great read, but do they need that story to pick upBootleg?

Kindt:不，是这样的。每个人都说，“哦，这不是重启，也不是续集，”任何一个做过更长的电影的人都会说“哦，这是一个很好的切入点”但它从来都不是一个很好的切入点。这永远都是谎言!他们只希望人们买新的。But we tested this on someone that’s helping us with the marketing and everything, and she had never readMIND MGMT, and she didn’t know anything about it, she never read any of the old stuff, picked it up, read it, and she approved of it as something she didn’t need to know what happened before and it worked for her. So, we have tested it on a human subject.

CBH:Human trials have already been taken care of. Okay. Amazing. Alright. Cool. So,Bootleg, we’re definitely going to be looking forward to with the return. I guess from there, I don’t think anything has been announced, but where are you hoping to move the imprint to? What are the order of operations or what people should be excited about afterMIND MGMT?

Kindt:Yeah, I’m writing and drawing another one right now that my wife, Charline, is painting. We worked together in department eight, so this is the first painting she’s done since then. She wanted to take a break because doing a monthly comic is hard. So we took a little time off. So, I’m working on one now that is all written, I’m drawing it, so that should be coming out in December. We haven’t announced it yet. But it’s basically [unclear]. If you’ve read anything of mine, you know it’s either going to have spies in it, it’s going to be science fiction, or it’s going to be a little bit of both. So that’s more of a spy book that’s coming out, and then, again, we’re playing with format, so the covers for that, it’s spy, so I wanted to do it with a normal cover but it’s going to come wrapped in a grocery bag. Like, a paper grocery bag, so on the shelf, it will kind of look like a piece of trash. But it sort of just disguises itself, you know, to go with the spy themes. So, that’s as weird as it gets, but inside, if you want a story with characters and things you want to care about, all that’s there. We’re just making the object interesting. We’re just playing with that. So, that’s coming out. I’m working on doing a book with David Rubin. Right now, he’s drawing something with literally a thousand characters in it. I don’t want to say what it’s about. It’s a little bit of science fiction, maybe a little, slightly superhero. I haven’t done any creator superhero stuff, so I’m dipping my toe a little bit into that and literally there’s a thousand characters I’m writing all the backstories for, all of them. It’s insane. And what else? Wilfredo Torres is drawing one now, though we can’t talk about it, he didBANG!和我一起，我们想做另一件事，所以我们就这么做了。是的，还有一些其他的事情。抱歉说得这么模糊，但我至少能告诉你我在跟谁合作。

CBH:Awesome, alright. Yeah, I definitely got my shop on alert, like, I want whatever is coming out from this line. I want to check it out, so I recommend people do the same. You’ve mentioned that you haven’t done superheroes, but one of my favorite things withMIND MGMT它是不是有点像一个跨界间谍和超级英雄宇宙，你知道吗?因为你拥有所有这些想象力和精神管理能力。你是否有最喜欢但却没有使用的能力，或者如果没有，你自己最喜欢的能力是什么?因为运用异能的方式有一种非常有趣的特殊性。你最喜欢什么?

Kindt:That’s tough. It’s funny, I was still immersed inMIND MGMT所以专注于让它看起来接地心，对我来说很重要的是，如果有人有能力做一些不可思议的事情，至少有一种科学——一种假的科学——来解释它是如何运作的。所以，我非常小心地做了这件事。但当它完成后，有人说“哦，这就像x战警。”就像“该死的。”有点像!我们绕不过去，不过没错。到目前为止，我只是写了一件事。我想我只是喜欢传染的想法，我认为这离现实不远。我认为，你看到世界上发生的事情，它在人们的头脑中播下了想法的种子，我喜欢有这样一个角色，他可以这样做，但他的目的是做好事。就像，哦，不是这些不好的想法，这个想法即将进入人们的头脑，能够植入这些具有传染性的想法，让人们改善世界或其他事情。 I don’t know. It sounds dumb when I say it outloud, but in the story, it’s good. Of course, it all goes wrong. I’m saying it like it’s going to be this great thing, but of course, it all goes wrong and it’s horrible. Similar to the opening ofMIND MGMTwhen Zanzibar is on fire and everybody’s destroying everything.

CBH:是的,是的。最好的意图。但最终会有一些负面的结果。Alongside that same kind of thinking, again, I mentioned earlier that I love the secret messages that are coded into the gutters ofMIND MGMT. That sort of approach to comics, mini comics, at the bottom of the page, so at any given time you potentially have three or four stories per page going on. But the way they all intersect, there’s a degree at which I actually have to focus on this. Like, you know that you’re demanding of the reader. What kind of works inspired you to do that style of comics? Because definitely for me,MIND MGMT是我第一批出版的漫画之一我直到2010年代才开始收集漫画。

Kindt:我很抱歉。

CBH:Right? But I loved it! It was mind blowing! I’d never seen anything like that. Was there stuff that you’d seen like that that inspired you to do it, or did the inspirations come from other forms?

Kindt:All I can say is that the things that I like reading and that I get ahold of are all sort of…gosh I’m trying to think of my earliest influences, but I think something likeCatch 22是早期的影响之一，它是一个混乱的故事，所以你有角色在一个章节中生活，然后在下一个章节中死亡，然后又活着。他从中得到了很多讽刺，所以这是一个复杂的人物和事情发生的网络，所以你必须在你的头脑中重新组装它，当你读下去，我喜欢这本书的结构。There’s a book while I was doingMIND MGMT,House of Leaves, it was just a horror book that sort of played with the structure, even the layout of the book, where at the end it’s just you’re reading it in a spiral. I love that. And then, I think Dave Eggers, I think it wasHeartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius书中有很多脚注。我喜欢把脚注作为叙述，作为一种增加书中主要叙述内容的价值的方式。

In a lot of ways, I felt like withMIND MGMT这些都是我早期的一些影响，但当我在写这本书的时候，我觉得24页的漫画要花4美元。我不想让人们在五分钟内看完。你花四五美元就可以看一场10美元的电影，享受两个小时的娱乐，所以我希望你至少花20分钟阅读这本书。你知道吗?所以，我觉得我脑子里有这个想法。我希望人们慢慢来读这本书。我想让他们读一遍，然后回头再读一遍，所以我在旁边加上了文字，不是为了打断叙述，只是为了让你们看到它。我的意思是，你在结尾注意到它，然后回去，就像“好吧，现在我要去读它”，看看它是如何工作的。它给了你更多的互动，而不是你读了它，然后忘记它。我觉得我的主要任务就是把每一页都包装上一些有趣的东西，所以你看着它，试着让读者慢一点。

I remember one of my earlier books, I did this three-book storyHistory of the Giant Man我花了一年的时间才完成，大概有250页，我第一次带着这本书参加会议，开始销售，我很兴奋。然后有个家伙过来买了这本书，然后走了，大概20分钟后回来，他说:“我在吃午饭的时候读了这本书，太棒了!”我意识到，我花了一年的时间，就为了让这个家伙吃个三明治，二十分钟就能读完这本书，我当时想，我需要更努力。这些书，需要更多的东西，你知道吗?所以，另一方面，人们来找我说，“我觉得我没有得到所有的”，我说，“没关系。”Like, you can readMIND MGMT, just the art and the word balloons, just read it only like that and you’ll get it. The extra stuff is there so you don’t feel cheated. You spend twenty bucks for the paperback, I want you to get your money’s worth.

CBH:Yeah. I get that. That’s funny. I feel like twenty minutes is too fast to read through the story, for the record.

Kindt:I do so too!

CBH:是的，还有更多的东西需要消化。Are there any secrets toMIND MGMT,或者坦白说，你的其他作品因为它不是唯一有代码的作品，人们没有发现你希望他们会发现的?有没有什么东西是你偷偷藏在书里的，你会说:“我不敢相信还没有人发现它?”

Kindt:是的，有几件事。有几件事。我会忘记，然后我翻一些东西，然后我意识到那里有一些东西。有几件事我会看一遍然后说"哦，这很奇怪，但这是有原因的"我忘了为什么，有一天我看了其中一件我就想"哦，是的，这就是它"就像，它拼出了一个秘密信息如果你在背景的艺术中读到它是字母当你读了几页之后，它是什么东西。And there’s an earlier issue ofMIND MGMT和Dusty一起，他是一个音乐孩子，在他的原始故事中，他原始故事的面板是摩尔斯电码，所以就像破折号和点，破折号和点，整个问题是面板的板子，没有人见过。这很难理解，它迫使你进入特定的布局，因为它必须是长和短，长和短，所以很难阅读，没有人注意到。我就想，“我这辈子要做什么?”你知道吗?但我想这是值得的。

CBH:这是惊人的。这真的非常非常酷。既然已经传出去了，总得有人把这一切拼凑起来。

Kindt:对，那些事我就想"我永远不会说什么，但没人注意到，所以我还是说出来吧"

CBH:是的,对吗?总有一天你会得到荣誉的。从现在发射到现在已经10年了。这是难以置信的。So, like, the whole focus on the Fluxus and the movement of things, you’d mentioned George Brex,The Case, as an influence and that kind of led me down a rabbit hole of researching Flux kits. So, like, picture a briefcase full of stuff and little art projects, and one of them that I loved, the description was that it was mini poems about beans and it was stored next to dried beans. Like, that was it!

Kindt:Amazing! That’s so fun.

CBH:Yeah, exactly. How do you think you’re going to mirror that with Fluxus?

Kindt:I’m hoping that if I disguise my books in paperbags and it makes you walk past it, like, I’m always thinking about the racket in retail shops. It’s all the big, bright, colorful comics with stuff going on, so I’m always picturing my books in that context, and it’s just like those Flux kits where they put the fishing tackle box with weird stuff in it, or when you’re walking through a museum—we love museums, so we’re always going to museums—and you walk through and it’s all these amazing paintings and all this stuff. And then you see this beat up briefcase with stuff in it and it’s like “what in the world? What is that?” That’s what I want. I want people to walk into a comic shop and then they’re looking at all this great art and everything, all these fun comics, and then they’ll see my thing, and be like “what is that?” So, that’s the feeling I’m trying to get, so like, we’re going to do it with the design and the size of the books. Some of them are going to be magazine sized, so we’re not doing horizontal books. Somebody’s already said “oh, retailers hate horizontal, weird formatted things,” and I’m like, “we’re not doing that,” but I want to do larger format things; magazine sized.

Play with fold outs and game folds, and withMIND MGMT: Bootleg, the special version is coming polybagged and when it’s printed, it’s florescent pink printed bag and then there’s a playing card inside it, and those playing cards are standard playing cards except that they have extra rules on them too. Each issue is going to have its own special card that sort of ties into the theme of the issue, but it’s also a playing card that you can put with any deck of cards, and then it changes the rules of whatever game you’re playing. Kind of like the whole deck we did, but these are just individual cards that are designed to work on their own with a deck. So that way, we’re just trying to insert that paranoia ofMIND MGMTinto your everyday life, if you play cards. We play cards all the time, so really, I did it for us so I could put this card in there and it has a weird rule on it. So, there’s four different ones, and then the backs are different, so they’re not going to match with your deck. It’s the same size, but it doesn’t match, so the beauty of it is even though the other person has that card, but then you won’t know which one they have because there’s four of them and they all break the game in some way. So which one does that person have? You don’t know. So you’re waiting for them to play it and then the other person, they know thatyouknow that they have it, so you have to play that card in a different way. It adds this sort of weird, outside the game layer to the game that I think is kind of fun. I don’t know. I’m just trying to have fun. That Fluxus movement and the things they were doing, they’re just having fun. You know? Like, let’s make comics fun. Make something that stands out or feels out of place.

CBH:我很感激，因为这些天我想了很多为什么我要收集我正在收集的东西?尤其是印刷，对吧?我已经说过很多次了。我爱死漫画了，我有很多漫画在这些长盒子里，但我总是说“这没有意义”。这通常不是一个合乎逻辑的财务购买。这是我喜欢的东西，当你说到赋予它们价值时，无论是在页面上，还是因为它的风格和设计不同，这是越来越重要的，在商店中脱颖而出，因为如果不是这样，就像你说的，我为什么要花4美元来买15分钟的故事，我可以在网上阅读，我就不用出门了。那样就容易多了。你知道吗?所以我认为这是一个真正的挑战。

Kindt:Yeah. I want people going into shops, right? Supporting your local retailer. I want people to be excited to read a single comic again, you know? So I want it to work that way, and I think mostly because I’m like you. We’ve been collecting so long, you sort of just do it out of habit, but it doesn’t have that same spark that it had when I was twenty and going in every Wednesday and getting a stack of comics and then going home and look at them all and put them all in order and then I was going to read them, and read them, and then skip to whatever. I’m trying to figure out how to capture that again as a creator, but also for people reading. We’ve got to do that. I want to be excited. There’s no better feeling than getting a stack of books or comics and seeing them, and you don’t have the time to read them, but seeing them waiting there for you and being like “oh, I can’t wait. Oh my god, I can’t wait for the new…” whatever it is. And then you flip through it, and you’re just excited. Like, that anticipation, that’s what I’m trying to get back.

CBH:爱死它了。我有两个相当具体的问题。我没有过渡。我只想问两个问题。:保存;are there any plans to get those back in stock for the folks who are wanting to buy it?

Kindt:Yeah, I’m glad you asked. We did the Kickstarter last year and it did great, and there’s a huge demand. I’m a huge boardgame nerd, that’s my hobby now because comics isn’t really a hobby. It’s like a job. But, I got into boardgames in the last few years, but the guys at “Shut Up and Sit Down,” they’re this channel that did a video of the game and showed it off, and we immediately spiked. It sold out right away, and so we went right back to press. The short answer is that there should be copies for sale starting August. Like, late August. I’d say September for sure, but probably August. It just depends on shipping and everything like that. It’s been a little bit weird. But yeah, there’ll be enough for everybody. Retailers should be able to order them. They’ll be there or you can get them online, or I’ll have them on my website, but we’ve printed a bunch and so there will be more of those. And they come with that deck of cards too. We did a deck of cards to go with it because I always wanted to do playing card art.

CBH:Yeah, no, it’s pretty. I watched your unboxing video on YouTube and then I watched some other reviews, and it was just glowing reviews from these boardgame folks. And just the game looks so cool, so that must have been exciting.

Kindt:It was so fun. And I don’t know, it was like two years of play testing the game. I didn’t design how it works. Jay and Sen were the designers, they designed all the mechanics of it. So I didn’t know. I’d been playing it so much and was so close to it that I was like “I don’t know if this game’s any good. There’s no way to tell.” You know? Like, I don’t know. I’d played it so much that I’m just not playing it in the way that I play normal games, or I’m just playing for fun. I’m just playing to make sure that it isn’t broken or to make sure that all the pieces work, judging the art, so it’s just different. But I’m so happy people liked it. But yea, there’s so many secret things in that game. There’s so many secret things in there. I jammed more into that than anything else I’ve ever done. Like, there’s a little red disc that is a round marker. It’s like a clear, red thing you can see through, but then that decodes things all over the place. Like the cards, the construction manual, the box, the inside of the box, the inside edge of the box has stuff on it. I might have a problem.

CBH:听起来超级有趣。我是说，我在视频上看到你了。我看到一些人在留言板上试图解码它，而你只是随口说“是的，他们没有所有的。即使关闭。”

Kindt:不，没有人得到所有的。

CBH:Which is pretty fun.

Kindt: Like, if you enjoy that stuff.

CBH:这是惊人的。我爱它。好的,很酷。我们会重新进货的。这是令人兴奋的。The other thing I wanted to ask, withMIND MGMT, so in the first volume—this is not a spoiler—the Field Guide is introduced to us, and then three or four issues in, a voice starts shouting at us through the Field Guide. It’s like, “you’ve seen this before,” and it’s clearly trying to tell Meru to wake up. Whose voice is that? Is that her subconscious? Is that her triconscious? Like, what is that coming from?

Kindt: Yeah, yeah. It’s a minor spoiler, but I always felt like that was her voice trying to break her out of the loop she’s in, you know? Because when you first meet her—and this is kind of a spoiler—but when you first meet her, she’s done all that before. So it’s her old self being like “come on. Stop following the rules. Stop listening to this.” It’s her trying to break out of it. So that’s a good question.

这很有趣，因为在第一个弧线的最后，她收到了一个信封，是她自己寄来的，我想她试图唤醒自己。当我真正在做这个系列的时候，第三期，我不知道我能不能做超过六期，直到我已经画了第六期。我把它画出来，然后看看销量是多少，看看我是否能够完成整个过程，所以我做了一个不同的结尾，它的结尾完全不同。所以我画了这些作为备用，这样它们就完成了，然后这个系列被续订了，我就可以完成整个系列了。但是，如果你仔细看第六期的结尾当她去拿东西的时候，有人敲门，她去拿邮件，嵌板之间有空间，我把原来的结尾放在那里，所以这几乎是一个备用结尾。就好像，如果她没有醒来或者没有跳出循环，这就是结局。所以我把它放在那里，平行宇宙的艺术我只做了六期，这就是结局。所以，我把它放在这里作为背景，平行宇宙的终结。

CBH:So wait, it’s like hiding behind the panels?

Kindt:是的，就像，这是正常的面板，然后在这些和这些蓝线之间有小的间隙，这就像另一个版本的铅笔蓝线，她没有打破她的循环。

CBH:这是惊人的。So, in one of Phil Verve, or Verge’s alternate universes,MIND MGMTended at issue six. That’s incredible.

Kindt: Exactly.

CBH:我很高兴它能继续下去，因为在过去的几年里它给了我很多快乐，重新回到它是一种刺激。好吧，马特，这真是太棒了。I’m super excited to see what comes next forBootlegand all these projects you’re describing. In terms of what’s next for you, it sounds like you got a super full plate withFlux House. Is there anything else on the radar that people should be aware of?

Kindt:是的，我不知道。只是，请继续购买书籍，订购书籍，支持你的当地商店，每月获得书籍。它们最终都会被收集起来，但支持每月出版的图书对艺术家来说很重要，并让每个人每月都得到报酬。有固定的薪水是好事。同时,对电视。我希望在夏天的时候我们会有一些电视公告，所以也许我们会，也许不会。如果有，我们再来一次。我们会讨论的。

CBH:不，是的，当然。那一定很好玩。So you said you’ve gotMIND MGMTin development—I forget—BANG!, you said as well. Any others that you’re waiting on?

Kindt:是啊。Dept Htoo. For some reason they all started happening around the same time and they’re at almost the same stage, so it might be a thing where we announce them all at once. But we’ll see.

CBH: Hopefully getting close then. That’ll be exciting to be able to talk about too. Cool, cool. Well, that’s good news. Matt, anything else? Anywhere you want people to go to find or anything like that?

Kindt: I’m good if you follow me on whatever. I’m on all the social stuff, so you can find updates there.

CBH:Perfect. Well, thanks for so much for your time. I appreciate you hopping on. People can find me at Comic Book Herald, of course. It’s pretty much everywhere; comicbookherald.com. And Matt, this was a blast. Thank you.

Kindt:Thanks man. I appreciate it.