What the Matrix book reminds me of is my experience with work-for-hire with console games back in the late 00's. The thing about doing those was that everything really depended on who was calling the shots, and the number of people in charge of those licenses who were also games people rounded to essentially zero, so you were always dealing with expectations management. Since game assets need a ton of dependencies to reach a playable state, scope of work was very hard to nail down, and this really created the majority of issues with doing work-for-hire. Things like making sure the new characters aren't stealing the show are all there, but there are a lot of more subtle things that can blow up. Seemingly small features like "characters can open doors" turn into things that stop you from hitting the milestone submission - and they turn into expectations because of something about the license that requires it, even if it's objectively terrible for the game as a playable, interactive thing. There are so many licensed games out there that are secretly doing technical backflips for the sake of staying on-brand. You'd get a lot of internal meetings that were effectively meetings about managing upwards to keep the project moving along by carefully pushing the design towards something that would get approved while also shrinking the schedule. It makes for interesting puzzles, but I'm pretty sure it ruined my creative endeavors for years afterwards, because you can't stay in the cutting-corners mode all the time - that just leads you into a nihilistic thought pattern. I got really deep into the "why make art" realm of thought after trying to let go of sheer speed and time to completion as a goal. What gave me a breakthrough was, of all things, taking a philosophy-of-truth course. You can justify all your creative work in a principled sense if you start with a brainstorm and then filter it by finding contradictions: every pair of elements that says contradictory things needs resolution - either one idea wins and the other disappears(e.g. heroic characters aren't shown using the toilet because one is unnecessary to the other) or you change one or both to a similar but more compatible idea(you show the characters being unheroic as they go to the toilet). Then you can brainstorm in more ideas and go for another round. Once you repeat that process enough what you have is - to the best of your ability - a coherent idea, one that can be very large and complex, and is likely to communicate well when produced. And having that in mind gets me away from the cutting-corners thought process. Like, when to use text or pictures or audio can be resolved by finding a set of rules that cohere best with the work, which leads to an invented style. And that makes it easier to switch mediums too because you know what you want out of them instead of it being an identity "I wanna be like that" thing. Uh, I'm a lot slower at producing work now.

I had the Matrix collection you mentioned at the beginning with the different creators. This story was always the one that stood out, especially the scene where in the Matrix Rocket is drinking tons of water but can't quench his thirst because in the real world his body is super thirsty

David Lapham created the best new GI Joe character in like 25 years. Michael Monk. in the IDW GI Joe comics. Love Lapham he's been just awesome since i first discovered him he dont phone it in.

So cool. Forgot about this gem, in those early days Warners coughed up a ton of dough to make content for the Matrix website, no one was really sure how important a movie websites were in those days but the execs didn't want to be left behind. There's a couple Matrix trades out there that collect all the website comics, Gaiman did one too, a lot of great comics in there...

This issue introduced me to Stray Bullets. It'll be infinitely special to me because of that.

Wow I remember getting the free Matrix comic at the movie theater. The Paul Chadwick stuff

Lapham is such a phenomenal storyteller. I love the clarity of STRAY BULLETS. Really good stuff!

Just Got this cuz I needed issue 2 for reading , when I got it out of the bag I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a matrix flip book. Now y’all do a video . Perfect timing

I remember they posted some of those early Matrix comics online. That’s how I got into webcomics

So this FCBD issue is what got me into Stray Bullets, now one of my all time favorites. Lapham did a panel @ the 2005 SDCC celebrating the 10th anniversary of SB. The FCBD issue came up & the question was asked what kind of effect it had on sales of SB. Lapham said zero. I raised my hand & said that was how I came on board, to which he responded “then we must’ve lost someone else”. 😆 So according to David, the Matrix/Stray Bullets FCBD issue resulted in no rise in sales of Stray Bullets. *shrug*

Great video! Still hoping we get to look at some of Tim Sale’s work. His passing hit me hard.

I have that issue as a teenager I was at my local comic book shop 1st free comic book day I was 12/13 at the time thanks for sharing this

I didn´t know this one. It looks awesome.

One the all time great FCBD books!

Recently got a whole stack of Stray Bullets for a good price, shout out to Fats Comics in Brisbane Australia

My favourite FCBD comic was Viz's in 2015 - half yugioh half jojo's