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With Further Ado #147: Five and a Half Questions with Hard Agree’s Andrew Sumner

With Further Ado #147: Five and a Half Questions with Hard Agree’s Andrew Sumner

Posted on by Ed Catto

Andrew Sumner is a dynamo wrapped in a fireball with the limitless energy of a blazing supernova. I’m always fascinated by everything he’s doing and the launch of his new podcast, Hard Agree, (I’ve become a regular listener) provided a great excuse to catch up with him!

Question 1:

Ed Catto: You’ve got so much going on now and such a cool origin story, Andrew.  Can you tell us a little about who you are and how you ended up at your current position at Titan?

Andrew Sumner: My grandfather and best friend, Pops Smythe, served with an American unit in Normandy in WWII, and when he came back to Liverpool, England in 1947 (after spending two years as an MP on clean-up duty in post-Nazi-occupied Paris), he came back with a great love of America, Americans and American popular culture – as personified by movies, big band music and the comic books he’d received as part of his US Army rations. He transferred all of those passions to me – when I was three, he bought me my first US comic (Batman #184) and I was hooked for life. Continue reading “With Further Ado #147: Five and a Half Questions with Hard Agree’s Andrew Sumner” →

With Further Ado #119: In the Navy

With Further Ado #119: In the Navy

Posted on by Ed Catto

I really enjoy teaching classes for future entrepreneurs. And one of the specialized classes I teach focuses on conventions and tradeshows. There’s a bit of geek culture thrown into that one too. So I really love it whenever entrepreneurism overlaps with Geek Culture

Another passion is monster movies and a favorite studio was the London based Hammer Film Productions. Even as a kid, I could tell that these guys took the classic monsters of Universal and revved them up with a bit more sex, a bloodier gore and a Swinging Sixties sensibility.

Dracula A.D. 1972 is one of the best Hammer pictures. The premise is simple, a bunch of kids resurrect Count Dracula in modern times. It was contemporary when it was filmed.  British actress Caroline Munro steals the show (wait: here’s an-almost 50 year old spoiler) as a doomed victim of the world’s most famous vampire.

She’d later appear in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Bat-expert Dan Greenfield has suggested she may have been the inspiration for Talia, Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter) and as a bond girl in The Spy the Who Loved Me. Continue reading “With Further Ado #119: In the Navy” →