Watch: ANDY BIERSACK, CLAUDIO SANCHEZ And TODD MCFARLANE Talk Connection Between Rock And Comics

The latest episode of Side Jams With Bryan Reesman is a comic book roundtable with Andy Biersack (BLACK VEIL BRIDES),Claudio Sanchez (COHEED AND CAMBRIA),author Chonda Sanchez, and Todd McFarlane of "Spawn" and "Venom" fame. A few excerpts from the discussion follow below.

Todd McFarlane on why the connection between rock and comics has seemingly become more popular: "I would hazard that it's not just new, and it's not just happening. It's just become more public. I'm the old man here. It's just art, a big pool of art, that's a big definition. When you become a geek — and we're all geeks here — you don't just stop at the one thing that you do. You like art in many different facets. You might not be proficient at it yourself or do it professionally, but you do have an interest in lots of different types of art and then you make a living over there. We just happen to live in a world now where we can expose it in a public way, more public way, than we did in the '70s, '80s and '90s."

He continued: "There was also a moment when MTV came, and everybody had to go, 'Oh, I've got my song, and I've got to visualize my song.' It forced musicians to think visually what they were basically trying to tell people verbally. I think we trained a whole new generation of people to go, there has to be some spiritual, imaginative thing going on in our head while we're basically saying these words out loud to get the crowd going. So you guys have been thinking about it a long time which is cool. It's been fun."

He added: "It's not an accident that the majority of the music videos I've directed have included animation because animation feels kind of comic book-y, right? And those are not me telling the bandmembers, like, Hey, we should do animation, it would be super cool. It's actually the reverse. They're actually coming to me [saying] it's one of the reasons why we actually came to you because we either seen your comic books, or, in the case of the PEARL JAM one, Eddie [Vedder] and his band had been watching the 'Spawn' animated show. They wanted to do a music video in which they were not in it. This was their way to get out of it because they weren't commercial. So they go, just animate it. It'll be super cool. And, by the way, we dig comic books and we dig animation, and we like that visual look. Let's go. The majority of stuff, even the last one I did, which is sort of half and half with Ozzy [Osbourne], still had the animated elements in it."

Andy Biersack recalled two big childhood influences: "I always say that I learned to speak by watching [KISS's] Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley interviews as a little kid on VHS. That was my frame of reference for how to carry myself, and I learned to read moreso [through the Batman] 'Knightfall', 'Knight's End' and 'Knight's Quest' series. Because I was so little and I didn't really know the difference between the Batmans... you gotta understand, I'm a '90s kid, so everything was Batman at the time. The Schumacher movies are in the theaters, and the Batman animated series was on TV. At the same time, there's this other weird mercenary Batman [in the comics] that wears this very '90s costume that I just became obsessed with. I might be the only person with a Jean-Paul Valley Batman tattoo on my arm, but that was very formative for me."

He continued: "Then, similarly, as a kid, in terms of something that informed my worldview, I was about 15 when I read [Alan Moore's] 'V For Vendetta'. I think it is the perfect age to be fully convinced that this is the exact right way to handle the world, that 'I'm going to be a revolutionary' sort of thing. It felt very punk rock in nature. It felt like the songs that I loved, and circumstantially, what was happening in the world at the time the Iraq war was going on when I was reading it, it galvanized me as this little punk rock kid. So those are two that were very, very important to me."

Andy on reading and revenge: "We just finished another record, the concept of which is centered around revenge. I wrote a bunch of novellas during the course of making the record, these different revenge stories centered around different characters. It started with Sweeney Todd, and then went on from there." During this time he was trying to catch up on reading like the Batman White Knight series and a book on theology called 'Dominion'. "I would love to be the version of myself that finishes that book, a version of me that doesn't buy as many action figures or spend my time writing songs about Sweeney Todd." He recently recorded an audiobook for his Sweeney Todd novella.

Andy also spoke about putting himself into his work. The protagonist of the "Ghost Of Ohio" graphic novel looks like him, although Blackbird from "The Phantom Tomorrow" comic and album doesn't. "I think there's a distinct difference between trying to write something that is you and then trying to separate yourself and write an outside story," Andy noted. "I have always struggled with not making everything that I've ever done ostensibly some version of myself. I would very much like to be the type of person who could write a narrative that has nothing to do with my worldview, but it ends up just being some iteration of me in some way. Even in the example of 'The Phantom Tomorrow', I'm not a bandaged-up bird monster character. I physically created the character, I made the costume. I had a fucking six-foot guy in the corner of my room that I. I envisioned, and I felt like it was me in the costume. ...I've been fortunate in my life to get to act and do other things and to be these characters. All versions of that are always based on being a little kid, drawing pictures, making stuff, wanting to be that character in some way."

Claudio Sanchez discussed connections between early MTV, comics, and his music. He said: "When I saw Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' on MTV... I was a child, but I could see myself wanting to be in that character. For me, comics and music were always an escape from my reality. I think that's one of the reasons why, when I created COHEED AND CAMBRIA in '98, I decided to partner the idea of the concept with the records. I didn't want the world to know my story. I didn't want them to know the personal side of me. So I constructed this false narrative that I could hide my life inside of. The connection I see with these things is escape."

The character Claudio Kilgannon is the star of the "Amory Wars" comic book series that has informed COHEED AND CAMBRIA's discography from the beginning. He said: "The book that informed me that I would tell these record stories in the comic book medium was a [Image Comics] book called 'Red Star', and it was like Soviet Union sci-fi. It was sort of mixed media. It had some 3D background art. That was the thing that informed me that I'm going to tell my story and science fiction. I had taken a trip to Paris in '98 and I was like, Whatever records I'm going to make are going to have this component. I just didn't know what the component was going to be. Going into the comic shop and finding Red Star was that for me. Every COHEED record, with the exception of one, is a part of the 'Amory Wars' mythology, including the last three which are in the 'Vaxis' arc. But as we get deeper into that arc, we find out how that is connected to the 'Amory Wars'."

There is also "Kill Audio" (say it fast, it's Claudio) who has a mini-me version of Sanchez. "That [series] was an homage to my friends," said Sanchez. "All of the characters in that story are all based off of the friends I grew up with. Chicken Coke Daddy, DJ Bedroom, they're all personifications of friends I grew up with, and we're just going through some wild thing, you know? When I was writing that story, it was about the amalgams that music is now constructing. Everything is multi-genre and multi-faceted, and the world inside 'Kill Audio' was questioning that creativity, but ultimately, the character of 'Kill Audio' was supposed to shut that down. He didn't realize that that was his purpose. And when he sees all of this, he realizes how beautiful that is, all this cross breeding. It was just my personal take on what I was seeing with all of the genres melding into one and embracing that."

Claudio also talked about the proposed "Amory Wars" show. He said: "We had a partnership with Mark Wahlberg's Leverage Entertainment for a while to make it into a television series. It just didn't happen."