At Tribeca Festival 2025, music rules on screen and on stage. Here's a guide to this year's lineup.

Music is the star attraction at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, which opens Wednesday evening in New York City. The subject of numerous documentary and narrative films, music will also be a live feature at this particularly festive festival, with some artists performing mini-concerts in conjunction with film premieres.
This year's Tribeca, the 24th edition of the festival, showcases nearly 120 feature-length narrative and documentary films — many of them world or New York premieres — along with shorts, revivals, filmmaker Q&As, immersive art installations, video games, audio storytelling, and music performances. Screenings and events will be held at venues across Manhattan and at the Brooklyn Bowl.
The festival's opening night feature is the documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," a portrait of the quintessentially New York piano man. Blending archival footage with new interviews, the film — which will stream later this year on HBO Max — tracks the career of the 76-year-old musician and 23-time Grammy Award-winner, who recently suspended his performance schedule for health reasons. The film also screens June 5, 11 & 15.
Other music subjects include:
"Depeche Mode: M" (June 5, 6 & 14), which uses the British electronic band's Mexico City concerts as the framework of meditations on mortality. Depeche Mode will participate in a Q&A following the premiere screening.
"Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?" (June 5, 7 & 9) traces the turbulent path of the San Francisco indie rock band Counting Crows and its front man Adam Duritz.
"Boy George & Culture Club" (June 5, 6, 8 & 12) explores the '80s British glam rock group.
"Something Beautiful with Miley Cyrus" (June 6) is a pop opera comprised of songs from Cyrus' album "Something Beautiful." She'll chat about it afterwards).
"Billy Idol Should Be Dead" (June 10, 12 & 13) is a portrait of the punk rocker, past and present. Idol will perform following the premiere.
"Sun Ra: Do the Impossible" (June 10, 11, 12 & 14) is a biography of the free-form jazz pioneer, poet and activist.
"Metallica Saved My Life" (June 11, 12 & 14) examines the special relationship between the heavy metal band and its fans. Director Jonas Åkerlund and members of Metallica will discuss the film after the premiere.
Among the films featuring musicians bowing at the 2025 Tribeca Festival are (clockwise from top left): "Billy Joel: And So It Goes"; "Something Beautiful with Miley Cyrus"; "Sun Ra: Do the Impossible"; "Metallica Saved My Life"; "Rebecca," featuring Becky G; and "Depeche Mode: M."
Tribeca Festival
The documentary "Matter of Time" (June 12, 13, 14 & 15) features a solo performance by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, dedicated to raising research funds for Epidermolysis Bullosa. Vedder will play an acoustic set following the premiere.
Mexican star Becky G, the focus of the documentary "Rebecca (a.k.a. Becky G)" (June 12, 13 & 14), will perform following the world premiere at the United Palace.
The South Korean band The Rose is front-and-center of "The Rose: Come Back to Me," and will make an appearance at the premiere (June 6, 7, 12 & 15).
"Still Free TC" (June 13, 14 & 15) follows the divergent paths taken by rapper and producer Ty Dolla $ign, seen during the production of his new album, and his brother, Gabriel, who is serving a 67-year-sentence for murder.
"The Sixth Borough" traces the Long Island roots of hip-hop (June 11, 12 & 14), while 2025 Sundance entry "Move Ya Body: The Birth of House," about Chicago's role in the popularization of house music, will have its New York City premiere (June 13, 14 & 15).
And you don't always need instruments; "Just Sing" (June 6, 7, 11 & 13) follows members of the VoCals, a University of Southern California a capella group.
There are also fiction films whose stories are centered in the worlds of K-pop ("K-Pops!"), indie record labels ("Paradise Records," directed by Logic), classical music (Isabel Hagen's "On a String"), and music therapists (Libby Ewing's "Charliebird").
And among the guests at this year's Tribeca Talks is music producer Mark Ronson (June 7).
A world of non-fiction
On June 14 the festival's closing night attraction is the documentary "Yanuni," in which an Indigenous woman, Juma Xipaia, leader of an Amazonia tribe in the Middle Xingu, evolved from an environmental warrior facing police tear gas to becoming a member of government. Directed by Richard Ladkani and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Other documentary subjects making their bows at Tribeca include the world premiere of "Surviving Ohio State" (June 9, 10 & 13). Co-produced by George Clooney and directed by Eve Orner, the long-awaited exposé examines the sexual abuse scandal involving Ohio State athletics doctor Richard Strauss and the trauma inflicted upon young athletes. It will later be streamed on HBO Max.
The comedian/performance artist Andy Kaufman, whose skyrocketing career careened from indescribable standup — he claimed to never tell jokes — to impersonating bad lounge singers and wrestling women on stage, until his death from cancer in 1984, is captured in the intimate documentary "Andy Kaufman Is Me" (June 6, 7 & 12). Making fulsome use of Kaufman's personal trove of audio and video recordings, interviews and puppetry, it seeks to answer the question: Who really was Andy Kaufman? We may never know.
"Jimmy & the Demons" (June 8, 10, 13 & 15) profiles graphic artist and sculptor James Grashow as he completes a remarkable, religious-themed commission on mortality — and then faces staging a career-spanning exhibition of his own life's work.
"Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything" looks back at the life and work of the trailblazing broadcast journalist, whose stamp on television spanned more than seven decades (June 12, 13 & 15).
"Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print" (June 10, 11, 12, 14 & 15) chronicles the history and cultural impact of Ms. Magazine.
"The Inquisitor" is a profile of Barbara Jordan, the first Southern Black woman in Congress (June 8, 13 & 14).
"State of Firsts" (June 7, 8 & 11) tracks the rise of Delaware's U.S. Representative Sarah McBride, the first transgender person to be elected to Congress.
The Netflix documentary "Titan: The OceanGate Disaster" profiles Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO whose submersible descending to the wreck of the Titanic in 2023 imploded, killing Rush and four others on board (June 6, 7, 9 & 12).
"Bodyguard of Lies" (a CBS Studios/Paramount production, co-produced by Alex Gibney) is an exposé of government deception and lack of accountability over the war in Afghanistan (June 8, 10, 11 & 13).
The antebellum homes of Natchez, Mississippi, are a tourist magnet, and a source of civic pride for the town. But as "Natchez" explores, they're more than just pretty buildings — they're an evocation of a racist past that some aren't ready to let go of (June 9, 10 & 14).
Choreographer and performer Jenn Freeman, diagnosed later in life with autism, prepares a solo dance that confronts her life's challenges in "Room to Move" (June 11, 12 & 13).
Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron is the subject of "Are We Good?" (June 14 & 15).
"Just Kids" (June 7, 8 & 13) follows the challenges facing parents seeking gender-affirming care for their children in states where such treatments have been banned.
"Saturday Night Live" actress Julia Sweeney's androgynous character Pat is the subject of "We Are Pat" (June 8, 9 & 10), which looks at gender identity and trans visibility.
"Holding Liat" (June 9, 10, 11 & 12) follows the ordeal of the family of Israeli-American Liat Atzili, who was kidnapped from his kibbutz during Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack.
"An Eye for an Eye" (June 6, 7, 8 & 9) examines sharia law and revenge as an Iranian woman, convicted of murdering her husband, faces possible execution based on the wishes of the dead man's family.
Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield, who died tragically at age 34, is the subject of "My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay" (June 13, 14 & 15), a personal film by the star of "Law & Order: SVU."
One of the most memorable of pop culture icons, Dorothy Gale, the witch-killer from "The Wizard of Oz," is dissected in "It's Dorothy!" (June 7, 8 & 9).
Alex Ross Perry's "Videoheaven" (June 10, 11 & 12) makes its case for the once-ubiquitous video store as a vital pillar of film culture — one we're sad to see gone.
If you were to put the tabloid Weekly World News and notoriously incompetent filmmaker Ed Wood in a blender, you might come up with Staten Island underground filmmaker Andy Milligan, a '60s director who reveled in gore, violence and sex in exploitation films like "Gutter Trash." Well, Tribeca is not so stuffy that it wouldn't celebrate his oeuvre with the documentary "The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan" (June 11, 12 & 14).
In many places, one may struggle to latch onto Wi-Fi or complain about cellphone reception. In the town of Green Back, West Virginia, home of the world's largest radio telescope, Wi-Fi and phone signals are not allowed. "The End of Quiet" (June 7, 8 & 11) explores a life of silence in the so-called "Quiet Zone."
Hungry after all that? "Nobu" is a portrait of sushi chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa (June 11, 13 & 15). He appears in conversation with Robert De Niro after the film's premiere.
Fiction
Many American and international narrative films are having their world or U.S. debuts prior to their announced theatrical releases or streaming runs. Among them:
Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon bring their natural chemistry to "Best You Can," about the blossoming friendship between a security guard and a urologist. With Judd Hirsch and Brittany O'Grady (June 7, 8, 9 & 15).
In the comedy-drama "Everything's Going to Be Great," Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney star as theater managers whose dire circumstances force their family into uncomfortable and messy tensions (June 9, 10, 12 & 15).
Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman are a young couple on a romantic getaway in a farmhouse in the comedy "Oh, Hi!" (June 13 & 14).
In the comedy "A Tree Fell in the Woods" (June 8, 9, 10 & 13), two couples on a trip to the woods actually experience said tree. Lies and psychedelic drinks ensue. With Alexandra Daddario, Daveed Diggs, Josh Gad and Ashley Park.
In "Esta Isla (This Island") (June 7, 8 & 14), young lovers in Puerto Rico escape to the mountains to evade a local drug dealer.
Nick Offerman ("Civil War") stars as an extremist whose son (played by Jacob Tremblay, of "Room") questions his father's allegiance to the sovereign citizen's movement, in the based-on-true-events thriller "Sovereign." Co-starring Dennis Quaid and Martha Plimpton (June 8, 9, 11 & 12).
In "Rosemead," Lucy Liu stars as a Chinese immigrant who fears her son has become dangerously fixated on mass shootings (June 6, 7, 12 & 14).
Guy Pearce (an Oscar-nominee for "The Brutalist") returns as a long-term prisoner who becomes a mentor for an incarcerated young man in "Inside" (June 7, 8, 12 & 13).
Oscar nominees Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn star in "Dragonfly," about a woman takes upon herself the care of an elderly neighbor — possibly with not-entirely-altruistic intentions (June 6, 7, 11 & 13).
In 1996, French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was murdered while on vacation in Ireland. A suspect was tried in abstentia by a French court and convicted. What if he had stood trial in Ireland? Directors Jim Sheridan ("My Left Foot") and David Merriman ("Rock Against Homelessness") present "Re-Creation," a fictitious take on that potential trial's jury deliberation, starring Vicky Krieps and Colm Meaney (June 8, 9 & 12).
"Kites" is a magical-realist view of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in which a young man's guardian angel seeks to direct him from a life of crime. From first-time director Walter-Thompson Hernández (June 6, 7 & 13).
The horror-comedy "Queens of the Dead" answers the question: what do you get when you mix drag queens with flesh-eating zombies? (June 7, 8, 13 & 15.)
Finn Wittrock ("American Horror Story") stars as a failed filmmaker who returns to his Long Island hometown to confront the actions of his past in "Westhampton" (June 7, 8, 11 & 14).
A struggling filmmaker fears losing his free-travel perk when his roommate, an airline employee, begins dating someone in "The Travel Companion" (June 5, 6, 11, 14 & 15).
"Honeyjoon" explores matters of grief and a young woman re-gaining an appreciation of life during a trip the Azores (June 7, 8, 12 & 13).
In the growing tradition of live-action remakes of animated films, Mason Thames plays the young Viking lad who tames and befriends Toothless, a young dragon, in "How to Train Your Dragon" (June 11, prior to its theatrical release June 13).
Retrospectives and reunions
Tribeca will host a 30th anniversary screening of "Casino" (June 5), followed by a talk with star Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese.
There are also 25th anniversary screenings of the Christopher Guest mockumentary "Best in Show" (with Guest and cast members, June 12), "Requiem for a Dream" (with director Darren Aronofsky and actor Ellen Burstyn, June 10), "American Psycho" (June 12), and "Meet the Parents" (with De Niro, stars Ben Stiller and Teri Polo, director Jay Roach and producer Jane Rosenthal, June 7).
Sen. Cory Booker attends a 20th anniversary screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Street Fight" ( June 13).
It took 50 years, but the 1975 body horror flick "Shivers" will play Tribeca, followed by a talk with director David Cronenberg (June 14).
And in honor of the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday, Martin Scorsese's 1997 biography "Kundun" will be screened (June 6).
A 20th anniversary 4K remaster of the Japanese musical comedy "Linda Linda Linda," a cult favorite about an all-girl high school band, with music by Smashing Pumpkins' James Iha, unspools on June 8.
TV
Episodic television is also featured, with screenings of new seasons of the MGM+ series "Godfather of Harlem" (June 11), HBO Max's "The Gilded Age" (June 12), and Paramount+'s "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" (June 14).
Novelist Dennis Lehan is the writer-producer behind "Smoke" (Apple TV+), about an arson investor and detective tracking serial arsonists (June 12). From Britbox comes "Outrageous," about six scandalous, aristocratic sisters (June 5).
Also screening are "We Were Liars," a Prime Video adaptation of the E. Lockhart bestseller (June 10), and the Hulu documentary "Call Her Alex" about podcaster Alex Cooper (June 8).
Tribeca Talks
Artist and newsmaker interviews include talks with Jim Gaffigan and Michael Ian Black (June 5); Sean Penn, interviewed by Kaitlan Collins (June 8); Rep. Jasmine Crockett in conversation with Whoopi Goldberg (June 13); and actress Ellen Pompeo, interviewed by Katie Couric (June 14). There are also panel discussions with creatives about the industry, from storytelling to funding.
Immersive storytelling programs at the Tribeca Festival include (clockwise from top left): "Uncharted VR," a cosmic merging of the human body with pan-African languages and AI data sculpture; "Scent," a game in which the player (as a dog) roams a war-torn city; Boreal Dreams," a simulation of the Boreal Zone and the relationship between climate and consciousness; and "A Father's Lullaby and Lullabies Through Time," an interactive installation featuring formerly incarcerated fathers.
Tribeca Festival
Immersive art and games
The festival's immersive storytelling program, titled "In Search of Us," features 11 projects by artists working via VR, augmented and mixed reality, and multimedia installations.
Pier 57, open to the public June 11-15, will feature playable demos of this year's games selections, including the fantasy game "Absolum"; "Cairn," in which you try to survive reaching the summit of Mount Kami; "Mixtape," a nostalgic look back on high school; "Take Us North," with is built on the stories of real-life migrants; and the horror games "Sleep Awake," in which the player must evade death cults, and "Possessor(s)," where you must escape a flooded city.
Festival Guide
The festival runs from June 4-15. For more information about films, immersive exhibits, special events and ticketing (single tickets and passes), visit the Tribeca Festival website.

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And then, coincidentally, I know Philippe Labaune, just from having been to the gallery, we have mutual friends and things, and he made the offer to show work from not only the book, [but] kind of a career retrospective. It's ballooned into something really nice. Are you somebody who thinks about the arc of their career and how it fits together, or are you mostly future-oriented? I'd say a combination of both, because — I have said this elsewhere, but I think at a certain point, an artist needs to become their own curator. Jack Kirby famously said, 'All that matters is the 10% of your best work. The rest of it gets you to the 10%.' But then in my case, I do a lot of variant covers. I've worked on many things outside of comics that are kind of hard to acquire, whether it's screen prints or fashion industry stuff. And I thought it'd be really cool if we do something that's a chronological look at the life of an artist — [something that] focuses mainly on comics, [with] a lot of stuff that people have either never seen or it's hard to find. It's the first of a number of chess moves that I've been setting up for a long time. And the gallery is — I would call it a second chess move. I have another announcement later in the summer for a new project. Making graphic novels is not like making comics. You're basically writing a novel, it can take years, and you work with a contract. No one can see the work, so it can be very frustrating. This stack here, this is my current work, and it's all stuff that basically hasn't been published yet. So I thought this was a great way to either reintroduce my work or — I hate the term 'rebrand,' but rebrand myself. In your essay 'Weapons of Choice,' you talk about all these different tools you use, the brushes and pens, the Sumi ink. Has your working style been pretty consistent, pretty analog, for your entire career? I would say mostly. I did start incorporating Photoshop for coloring and textures, kind of late to the game — I'd say it was not 'till around 2003 or so. I developed carpal tunnel around 2010, so I've tried to steer away from digital as much as I can, but I still use it. I mean, I use Photoshop every day. It's just [that] most of what I do is the comics purism of ink on a paper. Do you think of ink on paper as objectively better, or it just happens to be how you work? I don't think it's better, to be honest. I think any tool that works is good. You know, Moebius used to say that sometimes he would draw with coffee grinds, he drew with a fork. And I have some friends, in fact, a number of friends, who are doing highly popular mainstream books, who have gravitated toward digital work, or its various advantages. And I just don't like that. But one thing [is,] I sell original art, and if you have a digital document, you might be able to make a print of it, but there is no drawing. It's binary code. Also, I feel an allegiance to the guys like Alex Toth and Steve Ditko, who took time to teach me things. Moebius, I was friends with him. Frank Miller. We all work in traditional analog art. I feel like I want to be a torchbearer for that. How do you feel about the fact that comics-making is increasingly digital? I think it's inevitable. The genie is out of the bottle at this point. So now it's a matter of being given a new, vivid array of tools that artists can choose from. When you talk to younger artists, do you feel like there's still a lane for them to do analog work? Absolutely. One of the challenges now is, you can download an app, or you can get an iPad Pro and start drawing. I think the learning curve in some ways is a little quicker, and you can fix, edit, and change things that you don't like. But it also means the drawing never ends. One thing I really like about analog art is, it's punishing. [One] piece of advice I got early on was, your first 1,000 ink drawings with a brush are going to be terrible, and you just have to get through those first 1,000. And it was true, it was humiliating — every time I sat down and tried to draw with the brushes, a lot of the work is going to be in your your fingers or your wrists, and it's easy to make mistakes, but gradually you get an authority over the tool, and then you can draw what it is you really see in your mind. Before we started recording, we were also talking about AI, and it sounds like it's something you've been aware of and thinking about. Yeah, sure, I use it all the time. I don't use it for anything creative outside of research. For example, I just wrote an essay on one of my favorite cartoonists, Attilio Micheluzzi. His library is being published by Fantagraphics right now, and I did the intro for the second book. It's amazing, because there's a lot of personal detail about the man that was really, really hard to find, unless you could literally go to — he died in Naples, but he spent a lot of his time in North Africa and Rome. This guy's a man of mystery. But you now can get the dates of his birth and his death, what caused his death, what did he do? And AI helps with that. Or sometimes, I work on story structure. But I don't use it directly to create anything. I use it more like, let's say it's a consultant. My nephew writes [code] and he describes AI as a sociopath personal assistant that doesn't mind lying to you. I've asked AI at times like, 'What books has Paul Pope published?' It's kind of strange, because maybe 80% of it will be correct, and 20% will be completely hallucinated books I've never done. So I tend to take my nephew's point of view on it. You have this skepticism, but you don't want to rule out using it where it's useful. No, absolutely not. It's a tool. It's a very contentious point with cartoonists, and there are important questions about authorship, copyright protection. In fact, I just had dinner with Frank Miller last night, we were talking about this. If [I ask AI to] give me 'Lady Godiva, naked on the horse, as drawn by Frank Miller,' I can spit that out in 30 seconds. Some people might say, 'Oh, this is my art.' But AI doesn't generate the art from the same kind of place that humans would, where it's based on identity and personal history and emotional inflection. It can recombine everything that's been known and programmed into the database. And you could do with my stuff, too. It never looks like my drawings, but it's getting better and better. But I think really, speaking as a futurist, the real question is killer robots and surveillance and a lot of technology being developed very, very quickly, without a lot of public consideration about the implications. Here in New York, at the moment, there's a really great gallery on 23rd Street called Poster House. It's pretty much the history of 20th-century poster design, which is right up my alley. So I went there with my girlfriend last week, and they currently have an exhibit on the atom bomb and how it was portrayed in different contexts through poster art. There was this movement 'Atoms for Peace,' where people were pro-atomic energy [but] were against war, and I kind of liked that, because that's how I feel about AI. I would say, 'AI for peace.' I'm less concerned about having some random person create some image based on one of my drawings, than I am about killer robots and surveillance and drones. I think that's a much more serious question, because at some point, we're going to pass a tipping point, because there's a lot of bad actors in the world that are developing AI, and I don't know if some of the developers themselves are concerned about the implications. They just want to be the first person to do it — and of course, they're going to make a lot of money. You mentioned this idea of somebody typing, 'Give me a drawing in the style of Paul Pope.' And I think the argument that some people would make is that you shouldn't be able to do that — or at least Paul should be getting paid, since your art was presumably used to train the model, and that's your name being used. It's a good question. In fact, I was asking AI before our talk today — I think the best thing is to go to the source — 'compare unlicensed art usage [for] AI-generated imagery with torrenting of MP3s in the '90s.' And AI said that there's definitely some similarities, because you're using work that's already been produced and created without compensating the artist. But in the case of AI, you can add elements to it that make it different. It's not like [when] somebody stole Guns N' Roses' record, 'Chinese Democracy,' and put it online. That's different from sitting down with an emulator for music with AI [and saying,] 'I want to write a song in the style of Guns N' Roses, and I want the guitar solo to sound like Slash.' Obviously, if somebody publishes a comic book and it looks just like one of mine, that might be a problem. There's class action lawsuits on the behalf of some of the artists, so I think this is a legal issue that is going to be hammered out, probably. But it gets more complicated, because it's very hard to regulate AI development or distribution in places like Afghanistan or Iran or China. They're not going to follow American legal code. And then on the killer robot side, you've written a lot and drawn a lot of dystopian fiction yourself, like in 'Batman: Year 100.' How close do you feel we are to that future right now? I think we're probably, honestly, about two years away. I mean, robots are already being used on the battlefield. Drones are used in lethal warfare. I wouldn't be too surprised, within two or three years, if we start seeing robot automation on a regular basis. In fact, where my girlfriend lives in Brooklyn, there's a fully robot-serviced coffee shop, no one works there. And the scary thing is, I think people become normalized to this, so the technology is implemented before there's the social contract, where people are able to ask whether or not this is a good [thing]. My lawyer, for example, he thinks within two or three years, Marvel Comics will replace artists with AI. You won't even have to pay any artists. And I think that's completely conceivable. I think storyboarding for film can easily be replaced with AI. Animatics, which you need to do for a lot of films, can be replaced. Eventually, comic book artists can be replaced. Almost every job can be replaced. How do you feel about that? Are you worried about your own career? I don't worry about my career because I believe in human innovation. Call me an optimist. And the one distinct advantage we have over machine intelligence is — until we actually take the bridle off and machines are fully autonomous and have a conscience and a memory and emotional reflections, which are the things that are required in order to become an artist, or, for that matter, a human — they can't replace what humans do. They can replicate what humans do. If you're trying to get into the business of, let's say comics, and you're trying to draw like Jim Lee, there's a chance you might get replaced, because AI has already imprinted every single Jim Lee image in its memory. So that would be easy to replace, but what is harder to replace is the human invention of something like whatever Miles Davis introduced into jazz, or Picasso introduced, along with Juan Gris, when they invented Cubism. I don't see machines being able to do that. You were talking about the discipline needed to draw with a brush, and one of the things I worry about is, if we increasingly devalue the time and the money and everything it takes for somebody to get good at that, you can't decouple the inventiveness of the Paul Pope who comes up with these cool stories with the Paul Pope who spent all his time making drawing after drawing with brushes and ink. If we think we can just focus on coming up with cool ideas, it's not going to work like that. I do think about this. I think it would be very challenging to be 18, 19, having grown up with a screen in front of you, you can upload an app to do anything, within seconds, and that's just not the way most of human history has worked. I mean, I don't think we're at that term 'singularity' yet, but we're getting really close to it. And that's the one thing that worries me is whether we talk about killer machines or machine consciousness overtaking human ingenuity, it would almost be a forfeit on the part of the people to stop having a sense of ethics, a sense of curiosity, determination — all these old school, bootstrap concepts that some people think are old-fashioned now, but I think that's how we preserve our humanity and our sense of soul. The first big collection of your 'THB' comics is coming this fall, and it sounds like that's also a big part of the Paul Pope rebrand or relaunch, the next chess move. Is it safe to assume that one of the other next chess moves is 'Battling Boy 2'? Yes. It's funny, because for a long time, we had it scheduled — 'Battling Boy 2' has to come out before 'THB' comes out. But there was some restructuring with [my publisher's] parent company, Macmillan, and my new art director came on in 2023 and he said, 'You know what, let's just move this around. We're going to start putting 'THB' out. It's already there.' And I was so relieved because, again, 'Battling Boy' is 500-plus pages, and I'd work on it, then I'd stop working to do commercial work. I work on it. I stop. I work on the movie. It's like I'm driving this high performance car, but it doesn't have enough gas in it, so I have to keep stopping and putting gasoline [in it]. So it's been reinvigorating [to have a new book coming out], because it kick-started everything.