The Fixer-Upper on the Lake
Happy new year, lol. Obviously, writing is not where my head has been at as of late. As for some of where it has been, what of note I’ve read, watched, and otherwise engaged with since I last updated everyone on that:
Comics: Blue Period Vol. 10-15, Akane-Banashi Vol. 7-9, Fire Punch Vol. 4-8, Akira Vol. 4-6, A Witch’s Guide To Burning, hausofdecline’s Gary serial, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou Vol. 5, Lore Olympus, Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku Vol. 5-9, Ranger Reject Vol. 11, Tokyo These Days Vol. 3, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Vol. 5, To Your Eternity Vol. 5, Number Call, Bleach Vol. 33-35, the jellyfish, The Deep Dark, Alice In Borderland Vol. 3, Girl Taking Over: A Lois Lane Story, We Called Them Giants, Vinland Saga Vol. 4, Fool Night Vol. 1-3, Dandadan Vol. 9-11, Kagurabachi Vol. 1-2, NUDE MODEL and Other Stories, The Boxer Vol. 7-8, Ultimate Fantastic Four #33-53, Shortbox 2024 sale comics (Dog Days, Alas,, Ballad For Black Cassandra, Rewired, Beetle, Death Fiddles and We Dance, The Solar System, Songs for the Forgotten, Impasto, chrysalis, Freelance Arsonist, Lapis Blue, in fair verona, See You In Hell, we live here too, Pacific Dream, Being Useful, Last Stop, Clump, Dr. Limos Plays God, Clair de Lune, Catalyst, The Fool, The Absolute Mad Woman, home by the rotting sea, Peggy Piggybacks to Picnic, Blade of the Fane, Last Crane), Batman: Justice Buster Vol. 1-3, The Chimera Brigade, hirayasumi Vol. 2-3, Correspondence from the End of the Universe Vol. 2-5, IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL, A Study In Scarlet And Blue + Spider-Sense and Sensibility, Achewood, Loving, Ohio, Choujin X Vol. 7-8, Search and Destroy Vol. 1, Batman: The Adventures Continue Season Three, Ant Colony, My Time Machine, Qualia Under the Snow, Last Gender: When We Are Nameless Vol. 1-3, Cats of the Louvre, Kingdom Hearts II Vol. 1-4, Solanin, Universe!, Safer Places, Mary Tyler Moorehawk, Jessica Farm, Octultos, Farewell, My Odin Vol. 1, Zodiac, Anzuelo
Movies: Redline, The Fisher King, Megalopolis, Here, Deadpool & Wolverine, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Conclave, Ultraman: Rising
TV: The Bear, The Penguin, Taylor vs. Serrano & Paul vs. Tyson, Peacemaker, Seth Meyers: Dad Man Walking, Doctor Who (“Joy to the World”)
Games: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom: Rehydrated, Astro Bot, Control, Rounds
Prose (long): The remainder of Culture and Imperialism (Chapter Three, RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION, and Chapter Four, FREEDOM FROM DOMINATION IN THE FUTURE), New Adventures in Space Opera, the remainder of The Dark Forest (Part II: The Spell, and Part III: The Dark Forest), A Short Stay In Hell, All Systems Red, Lexcorp, Still Me, I Don’t Want to Be Understood, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Gideon the Ninth (Act I and Act II)
Prose (short): The Letters of Absurd Realities: On the Lettering of Aditya Bidikar, The Last Dangerous Visions (just Hunger by Max Brooks and Rundown by John Morressy, both on recommendation), In Other Wor(l)ds, The Ruby Incomparable, Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts), Everybody’s Protest Novel, the broken heart at the center of comics, Man Out of Time, A New Career In A New Town: DAN DARE, What We Plan to Do with You, The Godhood of Ima Day, Fracture: Zack Snyder, It’s Always A Rabbit Out Of A Hat: On magick, fantasy and creativity, with Alan Moore, The Night Journey, Wills, Mr. Lonely, There Is No Safe Word, Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, A Heap of Petrified Gods, Reflecting On My Relationship with Comics in 2024, Critical Thinking: The World’s Greatest Detective vs. the Ghetto, Pacifists of Steel: On The Final Year of Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman and The Limits of Superheroics in the 21st Century, “Holy Shit, The Earth Is Fucked!”: On Inio Asano’s Manga, SUNMAN (NES), Books to Take at the End of the World, A Manga About Transforming Into A Plant For The Greater Good, Here’s The Dumb Shit You Have To Put Up With To Read Manga These Days, I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter
Online videos: Patrick Willems’ train duology, Fast Food Streaming Networks, The Amazing Digital Circus Episodes #3-4, DC Heroes United Episode #1, Skibidi Toilet Episodes #76-77, Team Four Star’s Kraven trilogy, The Insane Exaggerated Cities of 90s Cinema, catching up on Max0r vids, Sweaters In Movies - What They Mean and Why They Matter, Doctor Who Prom 2024, Yanis Varoufakis on Cloud Capital vs AI: DeepSeek, Technofeudalism, Capitalism and the New Cold War, Fan Fiction Writers Get Steamy, Paranoia, The Best Movies Of 2024 (The Vito Awards), TFS Explains Dragon Ball BS!
Also I listed ‘Justice League, “Fearful Symmetry”’, but I really don’t recall watching that episode of JLU and according to a search I can’t find anything else related to the Justice League going by that title, not even any essays, so idk that that was about lol.
A newsletter topic I once considered was ‘the guys who won at comics’. Mark Millar, Robert Kirkman, the Man of Action crew; the fellas who properly cashed out in the way any given five hundred innocent suckers think they can too. Geoff Johns reached for that sun, and even if he got burned I’d say he made out pretty well. Grant Morrison probably qualifies even if most of the Hollywood scripts they got paid for ultimately didn’t get produced. I’d say Chuck Austen at least counts in spirit, got to write X-Men and Superman to everyone’s horror and then checked out to be the Steven Universe guy, truly aspirational character arc.
I’m not sure whether James Tynion IV is there yet; no adaptations off the ground thus far, though he’s signed on a seven-figure deal with Lyrical Media to make Tiny Onion a proper studio, so that may be transitory. As-is though, if he hasn’t risen up to mass-media royalty Heaven, he is for sure the reigning king of the direct market Hell.
If nothing else, you gotta cheer for this kind of second act turnaround that simply doesn’t happen in this industry. He was Scott Snyder’s nepobaby hire fresh out of college turned the veteran Batman Nerd’s Batman Nerd, the fella you put on Talon and Green Lantern/Space Ghost. Folks still fondly remember his high-octane Detective Comics run opposite Tom King’s Batman, an enjoyable team book tenure ‘ultimate-izing’ bushels of recently-deleted Batman history in exciting sci-fi escapades that hardly felt like the mass continuity patch it by all means functioned as. And for a good long while it seemed like that was going to be the apex of his career; even nabbing Batman proper was mired in the controversy surrounding King’s departure, and his status as a filler guy meant to be gently shepherding Bruce Wayne and company offstage for the upcoming 5G relaunch.
And then he cracked the code to the direct market so hard thanks to Jorge Jimenez backing his brainstorms up - an endless parade of slickly-designed new characters, gadgets, backstory reveals, and setups surrounding the most conventional Batcomic-flavor core in over a decade - that he became the man who could sell anything, and then walk away from the biggest big two titles mid-stride for six figure deals elsewhere. Rate him or not, that’s The Dream, and while for now he remains on the merch hustle, it’s not hard to imagine him reaching the same escape velocity as the others where he no longer has to churn these out monthly to make a living if he doesn’t want to.
In the meantime he’s diversified his output into pretty much every kind of major contemporary direct market comics project - his ‘shared universe’ umbrella of Something is Killing The Children, a classic Vertigo-style high concept ongoing The Department of Truth with Martin Simmonds that properly kicked off his current imperial era, and his YA series of OGNs Wynd with Michael Dialynas. Joining those are his most direct and intense shot at the horror comics craze of the better part of the last decade with W0RLDTR33 with Fernando Blanco, curatorial efforts in Razorblades: The Horror Magazine, The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, and the upcoming You’ll Do Bad Things, and ‘prestige’ minis such as Spectregraph with Christian Ward and The City Beneath Her Feet with Elsa Charretier. As I was writing this, he announced a new round-robin franchise project Exquisite Corpses with Michael Walsh and a bevy of other participants. And the arguable jewel in his crown, now leading the formal return of his beloved Vertigo, is his classy series of 12-issue minis that’ll add up to a presumptive novel trilogy of handsome hardcovers, The Nice House.
For the 10-12 of you who’ve been trapped outside of reality in an idyllic locale ironically underscoring your hellish fate for the last few years and haven’t heard about it: an interlinking set of friend groups is invited out for a vacation to a rented lakehouse by their Venn diagram overlap buddy Walter, only for him to reveal he’s some kind of alien space god whose species just destroyed the rest of the world, and he’s isolated them here to survive whether they like it or not. Impressively, things manage to get appreciably worse from there.
As a pure technical achievement, it’s easily the most impressive of what I’ve read of Tynion’s output. That’s not hurt by Alvaro Martinez Bueno, a name I’d previously thought of as ‘yeah, Batman comics always look especially good whenever he’s pinch-hitting on them. Wait, he’s doing a bigger project with JTIV? Well that’s swell news, good for that fella…’ undergoing his own seismic shift here. He’s mutated from overachieving superhero artist under Jordie Bellaire’s colors to ringmaster of a suffocating watercolor hell, where every glance believably comes with the texture of decades of simmering grudges, and every touch of tasteful luxury or messy lived-in history alike can only feel pitifully wanting in the face of the utter spiritual desolation of their state of affairs. His work on the epistolary material with AndWorld Design is nothing to sneeze at either; it’s an easy move in a post-Hickman landscape, but it’s considered material that reads as visually and narratively organic to a cast that grew up online together, and for a setting where the written word is one of their only connections to the world that was. The standout testament to the creative team at their height is the page below, what prompted me to write this piece in the first place:
What it immediately reminded me of was the following from Alan Moore’s Writing For Comics:
Pacing should be geared toward the scene at hand. A thoughtful and pensive scene would probably work best with quite a slow pace. A fast action scene, maybe a fight scene, would very possibly work better if it moved as fast as possible. Compare some of Frank Miller's silent fight scenes - which move very fast, flowing from image to image with the speed of a real-life conflict, unimpeded by the reader having to stop to read a lot of accompanying text - and the fight scenes of lesser writers where any sense of movement in the scene is undercut by the antagonists mouthing huge chunks of dialogue at each other. The above are not meant to be hard and fast rules; I'm sure it's possible to write a fast-paced action scene and use lots of dialogue, and I know that it's possible by increasing the amount of detail in the actual pictures to do a long silent sequence that still reads very slowly.
Obvious stuff, but it’s those musings at the end that this had me considering. The sequence’s usage of time, in a very real way, occupies multiple spheres simultaneously: there’s a surplus of detail, with everyone on display making sense and aligning into plausible groups at this moment of greatest tension that you want to take a second to work through. David and Sarah have known each other forever and the former is a big doofus who would naturally leap at the chance to blow shit up, Veronica is calling the shots on this delicate operation as the scientist of the group, Arturo and Sam are husbands and the latter discovered this mysterious new ‘house’, and Ryan as the relative newbie and outsider is keeping an eye on Rick since she’s seen what appears to be evidence (and indeed is) that he uniquely of the group is still keeping some kind of contact with Walter in a blunt insider/outsider dichotomy. At the same time, each panel comes with the next segment of the countdown ‘dragging’ your eye to the next moment to maintain the verisimilitude of the sequence, your own participation as the countdown physically grows on the page (as does the subsequent explosion to match the sensory overload) forbidding you on an initial readthrough from lingering despite an instinctive desire to parse the details, replicating the very frenetic tension the characters are feeling about how a big thing is about to go boom and unleash something for good or bad. It’s really good comics!
The meat and potatoes here is with Tynion as a character writer, and in a lot of ways, he has the goods. He’s comparable on his good days to Bendis and Ennis as a dialogue man, and not only does that sell the network of longstanding relationships the book banks on, but lets him put over the contemporary ‘every character has been to at least a little bit of therapy’ mode of interaction so many default to. Between his facility, a cast of people who know each other and can cut past a certain degree of bullshit, and the extremely specific and twisted stakes at hand, Tynion can sell with aplomb that these people are going to talk at length about their longstanding hangups and buried resentments with minimal prompting, and avoids using that self-awareness as a cheap shortcut to catharsis but instead a way of revving the emotional stakes higher as more and more is laid out on the table for the cast and readers to have to deal with. It’s an approach that easily could have been insufferable, and ends up frequently pretty devastating.
The thing being: this book is thus very, very good at talking about Walter’s manipulation. And actively paging back through to the pertinent flashbacks, you can absolutely pick up those threads, one or two of them in very shitty and human ways. But sitting down with those first 12 issues as a big dramatic brick of a book - in, I feel a special need to stress this time around, my own subjective experience - it’s hard not to find it the story of a bunch of people’s as far as we can see mostly ok friend Walter, aside from how sometimes he’s sad that he’s gonna have to blow up the world, and later they realize ‘oh shit, he totally did mention he was gonna blow up the world!’ while a weird alien who doesn’t seem as good at acting human as Walter did instead does weird alien stuff around them.
That’s obviously the most dismissive possible presentation of a book I like a whole lot. And I can understand why there’s meant to be some distance - you don’t want Walter to have too much space to feel ordinary, you don’t want his behavior to be so obvious that these people should’ve picked up on his worst side a long time ago, there’s a tonal argument to be made for leaving Walter a negative space largely defined by secondhand recollections - but the sensation I was left with at the end of the story was less a full narrative meal than that I just had a spectacular magic trick pulled on me. It sure looked like there was a fully-formed figure you’d come to really understand under that sheet, but pull it away and woosh! It was mostly people explaining him to you after the fact.
The reason I feel like peeling that scab on a book I tremendously enjoyed is I feel like I can intuit the version of this that cuts to the heart of things so much more brutally. I like the Hickman logos and the piecemeal Lost-y discoveries and the weird little lore drops about the alien technology in play (which becomes much more central and delightfully fucked up in the sequel The Nice House by the Sea)! When I couldn’t completely follow the network of relationships in play, all of that was what kept me hooked to it as a month-to-month experience. But sitting with the project as the whole it’s meant to act as in the long haul, I can’t help but find myself wishing that space was used for seeding Walter’s manipulations in a way that felt a little more…fully cooked, rather than relying on the strength of the dialogue to lull the reader along. Wishing that the larger plot mechanisms didn’t land for me like they were meant to divert the readers just as much as they turn out to be for the characters.
It’s particularly frustrating for me, because I feel like I've read the ‘pure’ version from Tynion of both strands that The Nice House represent. The Closet, by Tynion with Gavin Fullerton, Chris O’Halloran, and Tom Napolitano, is an almost purely character and dialogue-driven three issue horror story, and it likely remains my favorite book he’s ever done. Cutting, succinct, a full-body wince of a read. And on the perfect pizza comic end of things is his Legend of the Ghost-Maker serial with Ricardo López Ortiz, Romulo Fajardo Jr., and Clayton Cowles, the maddest rush of high-concept high-velocity violence the big two has put out since quite possibly Marvel Boy and the ultimate evidence he could have conquered the world of straightforward American action comics if he had cared to. I know he can do work in this territory that hits for me without caveats!
And hey, I can sit here and bitch all day long like I know what I’m talking about that I know better than him how he should’ve pulled his story off, on a scale of complexity enormously outstripping those two way smaller projects above. Happens all the time, not worth making a post about by itself. But the thing is: it strikes me that even were I right, it wouldn’t matter as things stand. The ‘ideal’ version of this I would hubristically imagine - an OGN with a more intense focus and fewer frills that doesn’t need the consistent mystery box seeding of a serial, broken up into chapters so as to maintain the vital flashforward/flashback rhythm - is not a smash hit direct market proposal in the same way. Adult sci-fi OGN series exist, but they don’t occupy the same territory as YA. Certainly not the same place as the 12 Issue Prestige Series, as strung along by sexy mysteries with Hickman symbols.
One of the articles I linked to above described Tynion’s current output as “the queer liberal version of [Mark Millar]”, and as a person who has spent far too much of their limited time on this Earth thinking about Mark Millar…I don’t agree, but I see it. There are real stories going on here, but the Brand Calculation always feels at least a bit in play. And hey, I get playing that game, you make the market work for you to tell the stories you want to tell. I get internalizing its shape, get loving it for what it is and the storytelling opportunities it offers and even its goofiest gimmicks. But early Mark Millar, the frequently delightful and often truly talented writer, was in hindsight always the chrysalis he had to emerge from as a butterfly of soullessly perfect franchise pitch generation, and in my heart of hearts I wouldn’t have ever had the beautiful chump any other way. With Tynion? Weighing up his work, what it offers and where it occasionally feels wanting and where his successes could lead him from here: I think heading decisively in that direction as he so easily could would be a real loss for a storyteller I respect. I’d like to see The Nice House on the Lake as the start of a journey of refining his craft with space to plumb what he’s interested in deeper and more directly, and taking advantage of his position to get away with more idiosyncratic work. Historically speaking when it comes to comics creators in similar positions, it’s instead going to evidence that he’s found a successful formula he can iterate on at length - man found his big new success in the first place via cracking a big one - and readers can only cross their fingers doesn’t lead him away from what truly makes him a good writer. But I suppose by the metric I led with, that’s a fairly reliable way to win at comics.
Hope I’m dumb and wrong! At the very least, hope he always has a corner for some odd unadaptable shit. I guess the concluding sentiment is that, as suggested by the reading above, I’m truly starting to become an annoying Fantagraphics snob, or at least as much as one can be while still having All-New Venom on their pull list. And regarding where that particular journey’s taking me, next time:
