017: Greg Pak For Food
Hullo.
Every time I put on my “This is the darkest timeline T-shirt” it feels less like a pop cultural reference and more like being the guy with the sandwich board in Watchmen.
Contents!
They call me Bond, get me and the other two green ones and profit in Monopoly.
Romans.
A little short of reading material for a Stormtrooper.
Wordlinks
Punching Nazis, Historical Edition Question
Byeeeee!
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Another big announcement week. Remember me saying I was writing a British icon that I'd never written before?
This is what Dynamite lobbed in solicits...
In contemporary politics, where Britain’s world standing is often more zero than 007, an assassin plans to exterminate the “special relationship,” and lead Britain and the United States into a very dark place…especially when he does so by aiming down the sights of an ancient Enfield rifle! It’ll test Bond’s deadly talents to their limits, in order to defeat the assassin and avert certain geopolitical disaster…
Which basically gives the tone.
I've been looking for an time to work with Dynamite for years. I've always promised that I'd do a book there whenever my schedule opened up... but it never has, and as my plans for the future are “No work for hire bar projects already started” it didn't seem it was going to happen any time soon. So when The grand Nicki of the Kingdom Dynamite suggested a one off annual with Bond, it seemed a fun way to try that out. It's an icon, in a genre I've barely ever worked in and at a place I've always wanted to work.
Oddly enough, the project has been harder work than I expected. Not the estate or Dynamite or Antonio, who've been all great, but the writing itself. It took forever for me to find a concept I liked. Or rather, I found a concept I liked instantly, but couldn't find a way to put meat on it in a way which felt at all satisfying. But I dug into it, and around it, and managed to find the missing elements when during a walk around the Imperial War Museum.
The thing with the icons is that I'm not particularly interested in doing a one-size-fit-all story for them. You need to make them live, and that means finding something that really captures you. As such, this ends up digging into some of the interest in history and geopolitics which drives work like Uber, and merging it with the contemporary era. It is very much a Bond inspired by Brexit and realpolitik. If you can't use a country's icon to talk about the country, what's the point, right?
Hope you find it interesting.
JAMES BOND: SERVICE will be solicited in March and is out in May.
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Andre lobbed another tease of WicDiv 455 online. Here it is.
Coo!
He's 16 pages into the issue now, and they're startling. I'm fascinated to see how Matt is going to colour them.
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Jon Harrison dropped me a line to mention that they've opened the Newcastle Forbidden Planet Megastore, and people were liking Doctor Aphra.
This amused me. The leaning of the Stormtrooper is just delightful.
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Reading Paul Dean's piece StarDew Valley and his own path as a writer about games was frankly a little too close to home. Go read. This is wonderful human stuff.
Go read this twitter thread I wrote about THE WILD STORM, which I loved.
And if I didn't have to head out shortly, I'd go on a rant about how much I loved the People Vs OJ Simpson, which C and I basically bunked off this afternoon to watch the final four episodes.
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I did a bunch of questions on my tumblr. Here's a few. Do ask more.
Here's a big one on Uber, and involves some spoilers. This is the last story, so do feel free to skip to the end now.
Q: Just read Uber Invasion issue 3, and man, what a blast (dohohoho). Issue 5 can't come soon enough though, and I say that with the deepest respect. Increasing numbers of people following my read/recap of the series are grumbling about "nazi wank," and it would be nice to have some counter-ammunition.
A: My normal response would be to link to the thing I wrote about luck and intent or if I was in a snarkier mood to just answer in the voice of Patton (“That sounds like QUITTER talk, and that is the most unAmerican of sentiments. Americans are WINNERS. We FIGHT until we WIN. This is some louche communist cafe horseshit you are saying, son.”)
Er… I’ve been writing Patton today, so he’s on my mind.
In this case, I actually sympathise. I’m fine with the issue, and know why the choices were the only one I could have made, but it’s still my least favourite issue of the nine I’ve written for Uber: Invasion so far. I suspect it will be my least favourite one full stop.
The thing is, is it issue 3 or issue 31? The answer, of course, is that it’s both, and that’s why there’s a problem.
If it’s issue 31, the problem is that it’s a double big loss for the allies. The last military battle - Calais - was a complete disaster. This is another one. If you actually follow the ebb and flow of Uber, I don’t do that, because it’s alienating. There’s ups and downs and hopes and fears.
But it’s also issue 3, and we have to re-establish the world of Uber, and how things work, including how battles operate. The idea that “this may not actually turn out okay” has to be reintroduced for new readers, and also for the volume’s narrative coherence.
So you can’t satisfy them both, so I leaned into issue 3′s reconstruction of Uber’s toolset. It sets the clock up for the US to figure what to do, and obviously Stephanie and Turing play into that, which is important going forward. And, most of all, the victory isn’t without its complications, as we’ll see.
(And in passing, as I’ve only just realised this - the biggest change between the two volumes? We see far less of the Axis side, in terms of seeing events from their perspective, at least in the first year. This issue is an exception.)
Anyway, as a black and white teaser, here’s the first page of issue 5…
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And I'm out, as I've got to go and meet Greg Pak for food. Yes, I know, comic writers, what are they like, etc.
Byeee.
Kieron Gillen
London
21.2.2017