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。我一直以来最喜欢的漫画系列的回归。I think I have it rankedsixth or fifth of all time right now。我最近又读了一遍，我们会稍微讨论一下这个系列以及这句话。马特，我们从这里开始。首先，感谢大家的参与。其次，这似乎是一个创造者将商店作为自己的迷你发行商的时代，带有自己的印记。这绝对是一个正在发生的趋势。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?

我仍然很喜欢书。我喜欢书架上有书，我喜欢边走边看书，通过看书脊来记住书，并与我过去读过的东西建立联系。我意识到我在Kindle上读了一段时间的书，然后在iPad上，你可能会忘记你读过什么。人们会问我:“哦，你现在在读什么?”然后我说:“哦，不，我刚读了一百本书，但它们都在电脑里或其他地方，在某个文件夹里。”所以我不觉得自己和他们有什么联系。这是一种脱节，所以我真的想做那些必须是书的书。当它们问世时，它们会成为很棒的漫画书，我们会收集它们，然后这些书会非常特别。他们会有有趣的封面或者与之互动的方式。你无法通过其他方式得到的东西。

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。你说过制作一副纸牌。一些非常创新的东西。你最喜欢的非传统方法是什么，你已经做过的或者你正在做的?

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。反正这也有点侵犯你的世界了。这个想法是想让你在阅读这本书的时候感到偏执，比如我得到了所有的东西吗?有秘密消息吗?因为它们中的很多都很明显，所以你会到处寻找它们。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。I only did it once, but there’s a short story within this crime book,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那是我为《迷魂记》写的一本书，他是一个喜欢跳跃现实的人。他可以在两个世界之间穿梭。这就是他的全部。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, which is being developed somewhere else for TV, so I didn’t want for all the different people optioning to get mad that “hey look! This is our character!” like, no, no. He’s no one’s character. He’s trolling me there, he just shows up in everything. So my solution was to tweak his name a little bit so every time he shows up now, his name’s going to be a little bit different just because I want to keep my continuity, but I’m also not building a cinematic universe. I have different people optioning different things. It’s a little bit different.

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就像这样，不过是一场游戏。当你在做这样的事情时，你会把它看作是那个宇宙的延伸吗，就像那个故事的延伸一样?我想我就讲到这里吧。你是否认为这是下一个章节，但这是一款桌面游戏?

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。它有点像洗脑了我对故事、角色和想法的看法。

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 MGMTagent. And I just felt like I wanted to keep telling the stories, but I wanted it to take a different form every time. So, we did the board game and there’s this deck of cards with art and then it’s a 52 deck of cards. It’s a standard deck, but every card has a different rule on it that sort of ties into the characters. So, you can play a normal game, or you can follow the rules on those, and it messes up any card game you’d ever play. Which gave me another idea for doing a series of books. I’m working on a series of graphic novels, mini graphic novels, that are decks of cards that you read and flip and you reshuffle them and it changes the story. What else was I going to say?

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:No, here’s the thing. Everybody always says “oh, it’s not a reboot and it’s not a sequel,” and anybody who’s ever done a longer run always says “oh, here’s a good jumping on point” and it’s never a good jumping on point. It’s always a lie! Like, they only want people to buy the new one. 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 MGMTand so focused on making it seem grounded and it’s very important to me that if someone has an ability to do something fantastical, that there’s at least a science—a fake science—rational for how it works. So, I was very careful to do that. But when it was done, someone was like “oh this is like X-Men.” It’s like “damn it.” It kind of is! We can’t get around it, but yeah. As far as that goes, I just wrote a thing. I guess I just liked the idea of contagious ideas, which I think is not far from a real thing. Like, I think you see things happening in the world and it plants seeds of ideas in peoples’ heads, and I like the idea of having a character who could do that but do it with purpose as a way to do good. Like, oh instead of these bad thoughts, the idea of being about to get inside peoples’ heads to be able to plant these contagious ideas that get people to improve the world or something. 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。这种漫画的方式，迷你漫画，放在页面底部，所以在任何时候，每一页都可能有三到四个故事。但是它们都是相交的，在某种程度上，我不得不关注这个问题。比如，你知道你对读者的要求很高。什么样的作品激发了你创作那种风格的漫画?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, those are some of my early influences, but as I was doing the book, I was like it’s like four dollars for a 24 page comic. I don’t want people reading it in five minutes. You pay four or five bucks for it, you can go and see a movie for ten dollars and be entertained for two hours, so at a minimum, I want you to take like, twenty minutes to read it. You know? So, I felt like that was in the back of my mind with this. I want people to take their time with this book. I want them to read it once and then go back through and read it again, so I add the text on the sides, not to interrupt the narrative, but just so you see it. I mean, you notice it at the end and go back, like “okay, now I’m going to go read that” to sort of see how it works. It gives you a little more interactivity with the thing rather than you read it and then forget about it. And I feel like that was my main mission was to pack every page with something interesting, so you’re looking at it and to try and slow the reader down a little bit.

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 thatyou要知道他们有，所以你要用不同的方式打这张牌。它在游戏之外添加了一些奇怪的元素，我认为这是一种乐趣。我不知道。我只是想找点乐子。Fluxus的动作和他们正在做的事情，他们只是在玩。你知道吗?比如，让漫画变得有趣。做一些突出的或感觉不合适的东西。

CBH:Well, I so appreciate that, because I think a lot these days about why am I collecting the things I’m collecting? And especially with print, right? And it’s like, I’ve said it a bunch of times. I love comics to death, I’ve got so many of them in all these long boxes, but I constantly say “it doesn’t make sense.” It’s not a logical financial purchase often. It’s just a thing I like to have, so when you talk about putting value into them, whether it’s within the pages or because it’s styled and designed differently, like, that’s increasingly really important, to stand out in shops because otherwise, it’s like, well, why did I put down four bucks for—like you said—fifteen minutes of story that I could have read digitally and I wouldn’t have had to leave the house? Would have been easier. You know? So there’s a real challenge there, I think.

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:是的,是的。这只是个小剧透，但我总觉得那是她的声音想要打破她的圈子，你知道吗?因为当你第一次见到她的时候——这有点剧透了——但当你第一次见到她的时候，她以前做过所有这些。所以这是她以前的样子，“来吧。不要再配合规则了。别再听了。”是她想要越狱。这是个好问题。

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。还有什么是人们应该注意的吗?

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.