-Our next guest is an award-winning TV
and comic-book writer.
His graphic novel "Adora and the Distance" is on sale now.
Please welcome to the show Marc Bernardin.
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
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Welcome to the show. -Hey! This is awesome.
-I'm so happy to have you here. You -- Let's be honest.
You launched a successful social-media campaign
to get yourself on this show. -I did.
[ Laughter ]
There's a comic-book writer named Mark Waid
who always says that breaking into comics
is like breaking out of prison.
No two people do it the same way,
and they seal up the hole after you're done.
-Right. -So there is no way that
this is gonna work again, but I had to talk about
this comic book for, like, a month and a half.
I was like, "Well, let's gamify it.
Let's have a good time with it.
Let's see if I can get on 'Seth Meyers.'"
What are the odds that at the beginning of this thing --
Like, "Yeah, no, Seth will see it,
and Seth will be like, 'Yeah, man, come on the show.'
Let's talk about your comic book.'"
And now I'm on "Seth Meyers" talking about my comic book.
[ Cheers and applause ] -Now, it should be noted, I --
One of the things that helped this campaign
is I am a big comic-book fan.
I follow a lot of comic-book writers on Twitter.
I'm friends with a lot of comic-book writers.
And it kept coming across my Twitter feed,
because a lot of people I liked and trusted
liked and trusted you.
So that helped a great deal, as well.
You seem very beloved within the field.
-All of the checks have cleared.
-Yeah. -So I feel good about that now.
Not wasted money at all. -Yeah.
Now, so this -- You know, this is, it should be noted,
one of the reasons you want to talk about it.
This is a special comic.
This was inspired by your daughter who has autism.
-Indeed.
-And why did you want to tell a story about her
and her autism in this comic format?
-Well, when she was diagnosed -- At this point, she's 19.
So this was like 15 years ago.
Like, lots of my friends were like,
"Well, you should write about it.
You're a journalist. You know how to do this.
You should write some kind of memoir
about raising an autistic child."
And I'm like, "I am the least interesting person
in this story."
I don't know what's happening in her head.
I never do. She's not that verbal.
She can't tell me what she's feeling.
She can't tell me if she is sad or if she's happy.
All I know is "I want chicken nuggets" and "I'm sleepy."
-Mm-hmm. -Like, that's what I got.
And so I then imagined what this interior life for her was,
and it became this sort of process of building the metaphor
of, here's a girl on a quest,
trying to get to the end of her journey.
And what's at the end of this journey?
And it's -- Because I'm a nerd and I grew up on, like,
"Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars"
and "Raiders of the Lost Ark,"
there's running and jumping and adventure,
and there's knights and there's all of this stuff.
But it's ultimately about a girl
trying to get from one world to the other.
-And your antagonist in this,
which is, I think, unique to a comic book,
when we talk about the convention of it,
isn't a character, it's not a villain so much.
It is this sort of vaguer idea of the distance.
When did you come up with that?
And explain, real quick, what it represents.
-I came up with it very early on.
The distance is, not to spoil too much about it,
but it's the place she is going.
In the story within the story, it's a force.
It's like a hurricane or a tsunami.
It's a storm that's tearing everything apart on its way
to get to this girl.
And so what she wants to do to save her friends
and her family is confront the distance where it is.
But I didn't want it to be bad. I didn't want a bad guy.
I just wanted somebody who had a dream
and had a hope and wanted to protect the people she loved.
I didn't need to slay dragons to get that done.
-So, I hope I'm saying her name right. Ariela?
-Ariela Kristantina.
-So you have an incredible illustrator here.
And I want to ask, like, when you, you know --
I've been lucky enough one or two times to write stuff
that then gets, you know, that an illustrator
turns in work, which is so incredible.
Were you very specific with what you wanted,
or did you just sort of tell her to use her talents?
-I was specific about the things
that I knew were emotional.
But then I said, "Listen. You can draw.
I can't. So, please, make it awesome."
And she, like, took it on her back
and she, like, shouldered this burden
of doing all the research.
Like, what does a 14th-century port city look like? Okay?
And she would, like, send me these reference pages of,
here's the Moroccan influence here,
and there's a bit of Moors in here
and here's a little bit of this.
[ Gasps ] Like, every page was like --
[ Gasps ] "Oh, my God. This is amazing!"
And, like, the main character, Adora,
I had written her sort of blankly.
You know, it was, she's 9 years old,
curly hair, she goes on a quest.
And Ariela is the one who came back with this little brown girl
with this massive bush of hair.
And I was like, "Where'd this come from?"
She was like, "Well, it's your daughter, right?
So she should look like you."
And then I started to cry, because that's what happens.
And then just said, "Okay, keep going.
Like, don't even wait for me to tell you things.
Just make it awesome." And she did.
-That's great. You also --
You host a podcast with friend of the show Kevin Smith.
-Yes. -And Kevin is a lot of fun
when he's here. I can only imagine --
You know, if anything, when he's here,
the only thing I'm sad about is how little time I have with him.
In a podcast form, you probably get a full -- a full share.
-Oh, I get two and a half hours a clip of unadulterated Kevin.
-Yeah. -And I get to be sort of
his weed GPS. -Yeah.
-You know, 'cause when he -- 'cause, I don't know
if you guys know this, but Kevin likes to smoke.
-Smoke weed? -A little bit. A little bit.
-Yeah. This is breaking news here.
-[ Laughs ] You should be a journalist.
And, so, like, I get to pull him out of the fog bank
cul-de-sacs where it's like, "Now, where were we?"
-Right.
-It's like, "Oh, we were talking about Moon Knight."
"Oh, right. That's cool. I love Moon Knight."
He -- When I told him I was coming, he was like,
"you should bring Seth a joint,
because there's a joint on his desk and it needs a friend."
I was like, "Kevin, you are an internationally famous actor,
director, filmmaker, raconteur.
I am a anonymous husky Black gentleman
who will be ferrying marijuana across state lines.
I don't think so, pal. Not gonna end so well for me."
-Yeah. Well, your instincts are good,
but I will say, I'm glad Kevin checked on his joint.
We still have it. This is -- This --
He brought this, I think, three years ago.
And -- -I'm sure it's great now.
-He dared me to keep it here as long as I could,
and I have it now.
I feel like it's just fully legal now.
[ Laughter ] -And now you can't smoke it,
because you'll get superpowers. -Exactly.
Hey, thank you so much for being here.
Congratulations on both the campaign
and this really, really wonderful book.
-Oh, thank you. -Thank you so much.
Marc Bernardin, everybody.
"Adora and the Distance" is on sale now.