November 8, 2016

003: Icarus risking flying too close to the Agadoo sun

Hullo.

Writing a newsletter today is a bit like trying to not talk about the weather when a storm is deciding whether it's going to flatten the city you're in or let you live.

But maybe you want a distraction, eh?

Contents!
WicDiv 1831 2nd Printing! (feat. General WicDiv update)
Obligatory VOTE thing
Tbubz stories and adventures and stuff.
My Top 40 Tracks Of (er) 2015
Q&A About Art And Stuff.
Byyyeeeee, etc.

***

The Wicked + The Divine 1831 2nd Printing.

As it's sold out, we've decided to do a second printing of the 1831 special with Stephanie Hans. Yes, I know that's a very traditional reason to do a 2nd printing. We should have explored the possibility of doing a 2nd printing because we wanted to waste money creating more of a thing that no-one wants. And then a 3rd printing, and then a 4th, and so on and so forth.

But no, everyone had to buy 1831, and now we're making some more and give it a new Matt Wilson re-mixed cover.

It's out December 7th, which is the same week as WicDiv 24, and you can speak to your retailer if you want to ensure you get it. To re-stress what we've previously said, the 1831 special won't be collected for a long time. All the specials will almost certainly be collected in their own trade towards the end of this whole WicDiv “thing.” Oh – and its order code is SEP168790.

Talking about WicDiv 24, and we've just sent it off to Image. It spends a week there, before going to the printer. It's the first traditional comics issue of IMPERIAL PHASE I and we've very happy with it. Here's Jamie's cover...

And here's Jen Bartell's alternate cover...

Jamie's order code is OCT160652. Jen's is OCT160653.

The issue... well, we find a different pace than recent times. I'd say it's more laid back, but that's not quite it. You'll see soon enough.

WicDiv 23 dropped last week, and seems to have generally got the response we were hoping for. Haven't done the writer notes yet, but I've had other things on my mind, mainly the beast that they call Tbubz.

But more of that anon.

***

The election has been hell. That's hard on Hell. Hell seems an attractive option in comparison. At least hell is warm and the devil has some pretty hip and groovy tunes by all accounts. While I obviously have opinions (put it like this – researching the fall of Rome alongside current affairs is not at all comforting) it's not really the time for them, and I doubt I can add anything to the billions of words that have been written about it.

I tweeted this earlier...

...which I suspect is all I want to say.

Hope we all get through this one.

***

Comic writing can be a strange job. Indie comic writing especially. I was thinking about this at the weekend, as I spent most of the launch for Jamie's gallery show in Leeds on my phone, desperately texting to try and solve a near impossible problem.

Oh – here's the gallery. Isn't it pretty?

On for the rest of the month, so if you're in Leeds, do pop along. It's at Munro House.

Anyway, I was talking about panicking.

Stephanie Hans had asked if she could deliver some prints to my house for me to bring up. I said sure. In the end, they were delivered to the neighbour and I was incapable of getting them before heading up on the train.

The neighbour was one we'd never talked to before, so had no contact for them. C, away for a week at a poetry thing, manages to contact one of our neighbours who we do know, who managed to pop around in the early evening and take possession of them.

Now – how to get them up to Leeds. C and I check couriers, and the vast majority won't deliver before Monday (or even Tuesday). The few who would won't do for less than a grand, and that won't work.

I get the idea that if I can find someone coming up to Thought Bubble I could arrange for the parcel to be thrown in the back of a taxi and driven to where the person is. I do a shout out on twitter.

Matthew Rosenberg – whose 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank is one of my favourite comics this year – is leaving that night. We have an hour and a half to try and get it about 20 minutes across London. I check in with my neighbour... and they've had to go out.

(That's obviously fine. They've already done us an enormous favour. They do more before this story is over. Fine Wine has been delivered since.)

So... can we find anyone else? Throughout all this the party is bustling around me, and I'm constantly approached by people who want to congratulate me on the exhibition. Which is kind and awesome, but does lead to me having a conversation which goes “Yes, it's great – I'm so happy for Jamie. I'm sorry, I can't talk, as I have to solve a problem with some prints. Speak soon!” and go back to aggravating my RSI by thumb tapping.

This continues until Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnson comes in. He does the same congratulation to me, and my response goes... “Yes, it's great – I'm so happy for Jamie. I'm sorry, I can't talk, as I have to solve a problem with some prints. Speak soon and... ACTUALLY YOU CAN HELP.”

Rich runs this story.

(This isn't even the most ludicrous story Rich has ever ran involving me. That would be the How Expensive Is Kieron's Wine? story.)

Between that and various friends, possibilities emerge. One is leaving too early on Saturday. Another – a friend of Dan Watters' – is leaving his house around 11am and getting in to Leeds around 3:30pm. That could work.

(In passing – Dan Watters wrote Limbo, which is one of my favourite Image debuts in years.)

Having ascertained the neighbours are in, I contact the local Taxi company who actually do a courier service. We work out that the first driver who's available would be at 10am. It is exactly 1 hour's drive from the pick up to the drop off. Which is when he's leaving. Yes.

Oh – and I need to beg the gentleman receiving the package can pay for it and we'll reimburse him. He says yes. After that, it's seeing if the dominos fall, with minor wobbles. The price is higher for delivery than they'd quoted. The driver is slightly late, but our hook up could wait. I'm in a panel when he gets to Thought Bubble, so end up taking a phone call from him actually on the panel, and directing him towards Stephanie's table.

But everything lines up and we pulled it off.

I wanted to ramble this out, as it's an amusing piece of chaos, and not exactly the sort of thing which you normally get to see. It was a hilarious, stressful and (whisper it) exhilarating twenty-four hours. It shows how so many people in comics can pull together at moments like this, just to try to help people.

But it's also what it's like being a writer in comics.

Doing whatever you can to make your artist happy is part of the job. The only thing that should make your artist unhappy about you is the actual script you're sending them. I'm aware that there are writers who just shrug off the majority of that kind of bullshit, saying it's not their problem. I hear about this and just shudder. At least for a certain mode of comics, in a certain and place in your career, this is what being a comics writer entails.

That said, someone asked me today “do comic writers want to have PAs?”

Yes. That would have been amazing.

***

MUSIC = MAGIC

Anyway, magic also happened at Tbubz.

Thought Bubble weekend is almost always one of my favourite weekends of the year. Sometimes my favourite. It started in 2007 and was the first con to ever invite Jamie and me. They paid for travel. They paid for a hotel room. They checked if we needed water. They treated us valued creators at a time when no-one else in the British scene was. We will always owe them for that.

The second year of the con moved to the Royal Armouries, and was the first year of the afterparty. It was in the casino – then named Savilles, renamed for obvious reasons a few years later. It was a bar, taken over, with creators and fans just drinks. There was a back room few people were in, with a stage. It was pretty normal.

Deep into the evening a selection of the indie comics crowd all want to dance. Con hero Mikey Bennett plugs his PC into the aforementioned stage, and starts playing whatever's on his hard-drive. We throw shapes until we're thrown out, having to dance quietly so not to be louder than the music. It's this dancefloor which I immortalised in the last B-side in The Singles Club. That dancefloor was Phonogram made flesh.

A year later, the sound system is arranged for the venue. We arrange a string of people to DJ. Some people have to drop out. It's majestic. I believe this is the year which ended with Matt Sheret, 2000AD's Al Ewing, Mike Molcher and myself on stage as the world's worst boyband, leading the crowd in a sing-along to Never Forget. There may be footage of that, but please don't go looking.

Amongst the DJs were Antony Johnson, Al Ewing, Jamie and myself. While others come and go – Boo Cook was the most regular other outside of the four - we end up comprising the backbone of the Thought Bubble DJs ever since. Antony, burned by a metal set earlier in the days, played carefully aged cheese and disco, always an Icarus risking flying too close to the Agadoo sun but judging the distance expertly. Al Ewing's sets are eccentric pop, his coming heralded by his iconic War Of The Worlds and full of He's Playing What? Moments which always land. Jamie is the one who always played it coolest with his beloved girl electro, but never ashamed to Duran Duran it up. Me? I was a mixture of Phonogram/YA/WicDiv Jams leavened with the most iconic pop hits of the last fifteen years. If in doubt, go big trash.

Some years were better than others, but all had their moments. Last year was unbeatable, where DMC rapped over records I was played. It was so unbeatable I was going to just stop. You can't top that. Why try?

Jamie noted it was the 10th Thought Bubble. We should do it, one more time.

So we did.

This year was a new venue, which is always a mild worry. This one is best described as a food court. Because it was a food court. It was a very fancy food court, but a food court none the less. It gave the whole endeavour a little 1980s teen movie vibe – as if the cast of Footloose had realised the only place they could throw a party was down the mall. There were a few issues. Sound was louder off the dancefloor. Hell, lights were brighter on the dancefloor, notably when the venue tried to make people go home by turning the lights on over an hour and a quarter from when it was meant to be running until.

It didn't work. Eventually they sheepishly turned the lights out again. The crowd was unstoppable.

Here's the crowd, being unstoppable in live footage.

That's the thing – that the party and the con has grown, it's become part of its mythos. People came to the con just for the party. They make their own legends. People are always dancing earlier than we expect them to. Last year, my 8pm set which was meant to be a chance for me to play obscure shit exploded into dancing forcing me to actually try and play pop suddenly. Here's some footage of the dancefloor...

So this whole thing could go desperately wrong if it wasn't for the crowd.

It did go desperately wrong.

I start my set. Now, there's been sound problems before. Jamie had a short cut out. When I start with the Phono-reference of Atomic, it sounds like Sleigh Bells declaring nuclear as gain is way too high. The Tbubz soundman – the hero of the night – fixes it. I carry on.

Then half way through 1 Thing, the sound stops. Dead.

We can't work out what's wrong. Later, we discover there's something wrong with the cabling, so even touching the cable trips the fuses on the mixing desk, meaning it all has to be rebooted.

We don't know that then. All we know is there's silence, and a swaying crowd.

It takes me about two seconds to decide. It takes me a further three or four to remember the lyric.

I start shouting at the top of my voice.

“TURN AROUND, BRIGHT EYES!”

Heads turn. I continue, voice starting to shred.

“EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART!

People join in.

By the time we get to AND I NEED YOU MORE TONIGHT! the whole place is singing along, and doesn't stop, it can't be stopped, and that's fine, as who would want to stop something like this?

The sound-board reboots. Jamie makes the suggestion, and I skip to where we are in the song and drop the music in. Chaos. Joy. Mass singing. Celebration.

The song ends, huge cheers.

I drop 212.

Magic.

So, yeah, there may be a new B-side in the Complete Phonogram.

My whole set? As best I can recall...

Atomic.
Milkshake.
Hot in herre
1 Thing
Total Eclipse Redux
212
Call Your Girlfriend
I Love it
Doin' The Do
Call Me Maybe
Shake It Off
Take On Me
Pull Shapes
Modern Love

Can't wait to see what whoever takes over does with it. It's given me so much joy. Thanks for anyone who ever danced. You have no idea how much I love you.

***

MY TRACKS OF THE YEAR

Okay, if you're not burned out on me getting all wanky about pop music, I finally did my tracks of the year for 2015.

You can read my ramblings here. The spotify playlist is here.

There's a good 4000 words of me talking Pop there, I fear. Well, sort of talking pop. It's talking NEAR pop anyway.

***

A couple of questions from my tumblr? I think so. Ask at kierongillen.tumblr.com/ask

Q: W/r/t earlier Formalist/Structuralist discussion: do you not like the terms Fabula and Syuzhet to distinguish this stuff? In my department Story vs Narrative Discourse is preferred, but I feel like that runs into some problems you articulated in your post

A: As I’ve always leaned audodiadactical you must assume that there’s huge chunks of my own thinking which I’ve built myself, and entirely recapitulate other people’s thinking or (more likely) fall short in huge areas. So I am entirely unfamiliar with Fabula vs Syuzhet, but will now start nosing into them. I like learning new stuff.

For a working writer, building your own toolset is often a process of internalising your own rules. If you’ve built your system yourself, it’s your system, and you can use it in a way which is hard with even the most well thought out external systems for study. I use all sorts of music-metaphor short-hand in my own thinking about writing, and that’s about how I think about my stories, how I create them, and how I evoke things. They’re not exactly things which are much use to anyone else.

Q: Lake of Fire looks and sounds really similar to a comic idea I was working on, do I give up and be sad or resolve not to read Lake of Fire and rely on my artistic vision being different enough that it won't look like a rip-off if/when I pitch it at someone?

Oh, this is always a nightmare. It’s happened to everyone at least once, and sometimes more than once.

Only you can really know whether it’s too close or not, and only you can know if it being too close is a reason not to do it.

I mean, sometimes it’s just the high concept and in practice they’re never going to be compared. I mean, EAST OF WEST and PRETTY DEADLY are weird westerns featuring the personification of death. I guarantee that at a point in development they were twitchy over it… but in practice they’re so different and “weird western” and “death” are common tropes to make a twist on, there’s no risk.

I did kill off one book I was developing way back around 2008 or so. It was called MULTIMEDIUM. There was other reasons for it, but at least part of it was Nick Spencer and Christian Ward were releasing INFINITE VACATION, a book about multi dimensional vacations. Multi medium was a book about multi dimensional holiday making. Now, what we were doing was actually consumer journalism parody with no interest in the more sci-if model of INFINITE VACTION… but that a successful book had explored the area closely was certainly an influence in terms of deciding to step away. I think if I went back to it now, it obviously wouldn’t be a problem.

I recently had the experience of the new idea I’d just had, and the monday after I had it a new TV show was released which, when boiled down to the three-word high concept was 100% identical. I watched it, and realised that we were miles away after that first scene. I’m continuing to develop it, but will twisting how I explain it to people so that the TV show doesn’t come to mind. It will when people read the opening of the comic… but by page 10 we’ve gone down a completely different route and it simply won’t be an issue any more.

(Let’s rip off Warren Ellis and start giving unannounced projects code names. This is PROJECT SPANGLY NEW THING.)

There was also the time early in my career, an issue or two into RUE BRITANNIA, where several people asked if I’d ever played the pen and paper rpg, UNKNOWN ARMIES. I hadn’t. I hadn’t even heard of it, as it was released just after the period I had stopped following the medium. There, I didn’t read it, and waited until the series was all done, and then went and had a look. Yes, one of the forms of magic - obsession = magic - was similar in practice to Phonogram. Perhaps more amusing that the other form of magic - where conforming to an archetype = magic - was how magic worked in ANOTHER comic I’d written 3 issues of before giving up. I put it down to us all having read the same books in the 90s.

So, in terms of advice, you may see that I go completely different routes. If you’re pregnant with an idea, and much work has been done, I don’t read it so you can honestly deny it being any influence whatsoever. If you’re still in the early planning… well, it may be worth reading to just see what they do, so you can make sure you do something different (or see if you ARE doing something different already.) Sometimes only a few small tweaks are needed. Sometimes none are. Sometimes what you see is enough to make you want to put it on hold for now and try efforts on something else.

(I still occasionally think of going back to MULTIMEDIUM. Clearly, if I did so now, no-one would ever connect to INFINITE VACATION.)

In the case of LAKE OF FIRE, I would hope that your situation is closer to Pretty Deadly/East Of West. “Aliens invade in a historical period” is a pretty broad canvas, with room for lots of different takes. I mean, I have the joke ROBIN HOOD vs PREDATOR story I always say I want to do, which is basically the same high concept.

I wish I had better, cleaner advice here, but there’s just too many variables. Good luck navigating it.

LAKE OF FIRE is also really good, and everyone should read it.

***

And that'll do now. Ivan Brandon was asking if I was going to write an essay about pretty much anything I did, so I can see my return to this particular archetype of nonsense spewer is getting the right response (i.e. mockery from friends).

Oh – as I'm clearly never going to write about Paris, here's some photos of our launch party, including highly amusing gifs of me dancing.

One last thing - according to people delving the Internet, it seems that there may be a Journey Into Mystery omnibus for late 2017. Which is a nice surpris, shall we say.

Thanks for reading.

Kieron Gillen
London
8.11.2016