March 2024: The Cry of the Planet
Howdy, folks!
It'll be a pretty short newsletter this month - I have a few things to write about, but I'm also going through some real creative doldrums at the moment so it's a struggle to come up with anything interesting! We'll start with some updates, as per...
The Usual
A Kickstarter campaign with a story of mine in went live on Friday, and it's very worth your time - Killtopia: Nano Jams!
If you're not familiar with Killtopia, it's the cyberpunk/sci-fi brainchild of writer Dave Cook - set in a futuristic Neo-Tokyo full of satirical parallels with our world today. Nano Jams is a collection of short stories set in that city, with myself and a collection of other writers and artists tackling media and its myriad problems through a cyberpunk lens. My story is called Virtual Duality (with the amazing Mau Mora on art and Micah Myers on letters) and it's about videogames, trolling and how sometimes the game gets far too real...
Please check out the campaign and back if you're interested - Dave has a spotless record on Kickstarter so it's very worth your time/money, and there are a lot of very good pals of mine on the creative roster: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bust/killtopia-nano-jams-a-cyberpunk-comic-anthology
Next week I'll be at my first con of the year - Coco Comics Con in Lancaster, run by the lovely chaps at Coco Comics. It was a delight to be invited to this one and I'm looking forward to catching up with people - those creative doldrums I mentioned earlier are biting hard at the moment so I'm hoping that talking comics for a day will reignite some of the fire in me.
Me, at me, in 2024 Progress continues on Secrets of the Majestic - I'm getting pages in, a couple of the stories are all done and lettered, and there's some really cool stuff in the planning stages for our prospective launch in November. I don't want to share any more until the details are ironed out and everything's in place, but all I will say is... keep some space clear on your Friday evening if you're attending Thought Bubble this year..! 👀🚽
The Rest
I'm going to rip up the usual format for the rest of the newsletter this month, because a) it's a long Easter weekend and I can do what I want and b) I haven't really accomplished anything of note on the writing/lettering front, and I haven't been keeping track of what I've been listening to. So instead, I'm going to write about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, and specifically about the idea of going back to your old work and trying to reimagine it. For anyone who's midway through: don't worry, I haven't finished it yet so I'm not going to spoil the ending!!
Remakes are a tale as old as time at this point - Hollywood in particular is incredibly guilty of wheeling out the same franchises again, and again, and again, with the end product inevitably reeking of cynicism and corporate interference. The term has become associated with cashgrabs, trading on nostalgia and a longing for days gone by to try and wring money out of us - in a way it's representative of a larger cultural malaise that hangs over Western civilisation specifically, where there's a clear sense that the "glory days" are behind us and we're all just staring down the barrel of a gun marked "climate extinction".
I was conscious of all of this on going into Final Fantasy 7: Remake, a complete top-to-bottom reworking and reimagining of probably my favourite RPG of all time - a weird, kooky, very Japanese and yet globally relatable tale about the slow death of a planet due to its natural resources being mined for energy (sensing a theme here..?) and the lovable anime-haired moppets tasked with saving it. I steeled myself for it to be as cynical and as phoned-in as those Hollywood remakes, trading on our fond memories of the original.
And then Aerith showed up and I started full-on ugly crying because everything about her re-introduction was perfect, and I immediately realised how much it would devastate me having to watch the story play out again (spoilers for a game that was released in 1997, sorry not sorry: Aerith is killed by the game's big bad, Sephiroth, at the end of the second act. She essentially sacrifices herself to restore the flow of energy within the planet so it can fight off the horrific calamity he wants to bring about. It is emotionally devastating.)
But as I continued to play through, dazzled by the amount of time, effort and care that had been poured into the game, I realised that the developers were up to something - not content with just fully realising a vision that suffered due to technological constraints in the late 90s, they were also playing with my memory of the story and how events unfolded. Don't get me wrong - some of the sections are very faithful to the original, but with sharper and more mature writing (the Barret/Dyne scene in particular absolutely nailed what I was hoping for). But there's a sense that instead of sticking to the story religiously, the writers decided to experiment with it. The original game is possibly one of the finest examples of an "unreliable narrator" trope in fiction, with some big twists baked into the story, and with this grand project to reimagine the game it feels like the developers are challenging us as players - what do you remember? What is real and what is imaginary? And crucially: what if things were different?
I'm genuinely torn about this in a way that I haven't been about a videogame in a very long time - on the one hand, Aerith's death was one of the most powerful and emotionally charged bits of storytelling I'd ever encountered, and part of me wants to see how it unfolds now that the developers can do whatever they want graphically. My own internal memory/version of FF7 has Aerith dying burned into it. But on the other, there's a real sense of possibility here - they know that we all think we know what's going to happen, and have managed to make it seem genuinely possible that fate might be altered and she might survive. Her sense of gentle sadness and resignation that was communicated merely through text dialogue in 1997 has been refined and deepened, and as a character she's much more developed - so I want to see her live on, much as it would dramatically change the entire final act of a story that I've fondly experienced many, many times before and potentially make the last part of the story into a completely different experience.
Bringing this back around - I completely understand the desire to revisit your earlier work and see if you can just... do it better. Some of the earliest songs I recorded with Northern Oak have absolutely awful production (because I didn't know what I was doing) and I think would benefit massively from a revamp, with all the technology and knowledge now at my disposal. But I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have the will to completely rewrite them because even if some of the riffs are flawed or the lyrics aren't perfect, they're a microcosm of who I was and who we were at that time. Going back to something which holds such a special place for so many people and choosing to just shove your hands in and jumble it up is an incredibly bold decision, and whether it pans out or not, I'm very glad that the developers decided to make it. They could have made a carbon copy of the original game with PS5-level graphics and printed money - instead they chose to reimagine the whole concept of a cynical remake and create something much more interesting.
(this piece may become immediately dated depending on what happens when I finish the game at some point tomorrow..!)
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Turns out I had more to write about than I thought..! Thanks for reading (if you got this far), and enjoy the rest of the long weekend if you get one. Back at it on Tuesday..!
All the best,