D'ORC, the Hottest Comic Book with Brett Bean

February 22, 2026·57 min·3 clips

Brett explains that the shield got an eyeball in the middle because he wanted a defensive weapon that was also offensive.

The cold open is noisy. Once the unrelated ad copy gets out of the way, Tommy comes in hot on D'ORC as a funny, gory, Conan-adjacent read that grabbed him for about 25 minutes. Brett sounds caught off guard in the best way. From there, the episode loosens into a comics-shop kind of talk, with enthusiasm, creator nerves, and reader reaction all bumping into each other. The shield steals the room. Tommy says the main character works right away, but the shield is what had him laughing by himself in a coffee shop like somebody getting cracked up by panels in public. Brett brings it back to the design. Once he had the character direction, he needed a name, because designing without one felt like aiming at a bullseye in the dark. That gives the conversation its useful bit of craft. The book sounds like a barbarian joke, and it is, but Brett talks about making the joke work through clear visual choices and character beats. Conan is all over it. Tommy and Brett kick around a Frazetta-style cover pose: sword up, shield back, eyeball hanging over the shoulder. They also know how dangerous that territory is. Brett talks about Frazetta and Bill Watterson like artists you almost do not touch, the kind of names that make commissions feel scary because the bar sits so high. That humility helps. The episode stays excited without turning into pure hype. Tommy mostly stays in reader mode. He keeps pointing to the things that hit for him: the humor, the gore, the fighting, the ridiculous shield, and that feeling of Conan being pushed through a stranger comics filter. Near the end, the talk gets practical. The host points listeners toward comic shops, pull lists, Image Comics' site, and ordering issues two and beyond so copies do not vanish before people ask for them. Under the jokes and sword poses, that is the other thread here: comics survive when readers actually tell shops they want the next issue. Anyone looking for a tidy craft lecture may find this too loose, but the fan energy is the point.

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