For the final Eating the Fantastic culinary conversation of 2019, we return to the Baltimore Book Festival, following up on last episode’s lunch there with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. This time around, you get to take a seat at the table with Bob Proehl, who published his first novel in in 2016. A Hundred Thousand Worlds is about the star of a cult sci-fi TV show and her nine-year-old son making a cross-country road trip with many stops at comic book conventions along the way, and was named a Booklist best book of the year.

His latest novel, The Nobody People, about the emergence of super-powered beings who’ve been living among us, came out earlier this year. He also wrote on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1968 album The Gilded Palace of Sin as part of Continuum International Publishing’s book series 33 1/3. He has been a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction as well as a resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony.

We slipped away to Sabatino’s Italian restaurant during the two-hour gap between my panel on “Sandman to Saga: Great Comics & Graphic Novels for Adults” and his on “Dystopias, Near Future & Present,” where we chatted over orders of veal parmigiana and eggplant parmigiana. (I’ll leave it to you to guess which of us was the carnivore, though I suspect that if you’re a regular listener, you’ll already know.)

We discussed how it really all began for him with poetry, the way giving a non-comics reader Watchmen for their first comic is like giving a non-novel reader Ulysses as their first novel, why discovering Sandman was a lifesaver, the reason the Flying Burrito Brothers 1968 debut album The Gilded Palace of Sin matters so much to him, why he had a case of Imposter Syndrome over his first book and how he survived it, the reasons he’s so offended by The Big Bang Theory, what he meant when he said “I actually like boring books,” his love for The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the X-Men, whether it’s hard to get a beer in New York at six o’clock in the morning, why he wasn’t disappointed in the Lost finale, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation —

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Here’s what we ate during our meal at Sabatino’s —

Veal Parmigiana

Pasta

Eggplant Parmigiana

And we ended the meal with cannolis, one of which you can spy in Bob’s hand in the photo up top.

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