054: pan-geek alliance
Hullo.
I'm feeling Schroedinger's sick at the moment. C has been ill for the best part of two weeks. I finally caught a taste of it on Monday, but after a little flirtation with my nose it appears to have basically given up. I'm unsure if it's a trap, trying to lure me to going to the pub tonight, when it will beat me up on the way home and leave me good for nothing.
Contents!
24 Panels
Comics That Are Released
Folly
The Jazz Age Cometh
Asking Me Stuff
Byeeeeeeeeeee!
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Last year, in the wake of Grenfell, 24 Stories was produced. To quote from their Unbound page, it was “an anthology of short stories to aid PTSD related needs of survivors of the Grenfell tower fire and Trauma Response Network.” Edited by Cathy Burke, it includes 24 stories (including ones by established names like Irvine Welsh, Christopher Brookmyre and Nina Stibbe, as previously unseen people) and is still available to pre-order.
They've decided to do a comics anthology to continue raising money. They asked me to be Editor-In-Chief, and I said yes. Basically, I'll be assisting in whatever way I can.
Details of the anthology are here. Essentially, it mirrors the prose anthology in structure, with open submissions for new talents as well as more established names who I'll be approaching. So, yes, an established creator reading this and interested in contributing their time should definitely drop a line.
The key formal element? No story can have more than 24 panels.
Thematically, we're looking for stories of community and hope. To state the obvious, an anthology in support of PTSD should be careful about what it can include. Copyright will stay with the holder, and suitable stories which don't make the book will be included on the website. As said, go see the page for more details (including a contact address to ask stuff) and the deadline is June 30th.
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Two books out this week. First, Doctor Aphra where Si, Emilio and myself dig further into the Out Of Sight-ness. In shops and comixology now.
Secondly, Uber Invasion 11, which I had to put further down the newsletter, as there's no way I was going straight from a PTSD and Trauma charity section to this fucking book. Uber Invasion 11 is the climax of the first year of Uber Invasion, and the end of the first “campaign” in the book. 12 is an epilogue and, as is Uber's wont, bleak.
Uber Invasion has been lagging digitally on comixology, so I'm not sure when it'll be there, but should be in shops yesterday. You can get it digitally from Comics Cavalcade.
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I should mention Follycon (as in, this year's Eastercon) again. Part of me worries I haven't mentioned it at all yet. That would be amiss.
I'm actually a guest of honour. Apart from Margate, it's the only con that I'm definitely doing this year. Thought Bubble is likely, but not 100%. I could end up doing NYCC if Spangly New Thing launches around there, but even if it does, I'm unsure.
Still – this should be interesting. Working primarily in a comic space means I don't really have much exposure to a more literary Sci-fi model. The closest is Nine Worlds, whose pan-geek alliance always has been built on top of the structure.
Follycon is from March 30th to April 2nd, and is in Harrogate. You can get tickets here. I'm looking forward to it enormously, and not just because they said I can DJ something.
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WicDiv 1923 is out next week (February 7th). Here's the comps. We'll be lobbing a preview online between now and then, and Aud says she'll likely be lobbing up some panels on Instagram.
This is a meaty one.
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Oh, man, I was busy on the Tumblr Asks this week.
Q: Will the 1920s WicDiv special reveal anything critical to the main story? Or maybe a better way to say it, should we all read the special before reading #34 onward? Given the cover for #35, I'm even more convinced that the secrets of the Bloody Retreat will have major bearing on the current Recurrence. And on a more practical note, will the one-shots be collected in hardcover?
A: Specials are designed to be read at the point of publication, and normally include spoilers of everything up to the latest trade.
(So the Xmas special, released before IMPERIAL PHASE II, didn’t include any spoilers for IMPERIAL PHASE II. 1923, released after IMPERIAL PHASE II, does include some elements of IMPERIAL PHASE II.)
They’re also designed to be read all together, when they’re collected as the eighth trade in the series, before the last trade. The specials trade will be eventually collected in the fourth hardcover.
In other words, it’s required reading for the whole story. Whether someone reads it when it’s released on in the specials trade is up to you. The final volume will assume the knowledge of everything in the specials.
(EDIT: Er… it’s not like there will be a test or anything.)
Where and when you choose to read the specials will certainly impact how you view the story. In this case, you will certainly know a lot more about 1923 if you read the special, though everything you need to know is in 1923.
This is very clinical answer.
Q: Dear Kieron, I'm currently poring through Rue Britannia, which is great. Out of curiosity, why does Kohl wish (or consider wishing) the Style Council never existed, and how does that relate to unreconstructed rockism? (I assume that mashing up Girls Aloud and T. Rex is the radical poptimism plank.)
A: It took me a while to remember that this was some of the Theban in issue 5. My urge is to say “If you care enough about PG to actually translate the Theban, I suspect I should leave you to figure it out.”
However… .hmm. That I wrote it 12 years ago makes all my answers deeply unreliable. All the fragments were meant to be examples of the sort of thing Kohl was playing with - little fragments of spell ideas. Of course, he doesn’t commit to any of them.
If I can unpack the thinking, Rockism (And, oh god, I started reading the Wikipedia page and basically shuddered) is basically a belief of the normative nature of rock (as in, drums and guitars and a singer is all that is properly serious pop music) - but also, the myth of authenticity (as in, a dismissal of the manufactured and pretense). The Style Council, especially in the Britpop era were, if not written out at least viewed as an aberration from Paul Weller’s history, due to his string of successful back-to-basics 60s-rock albums. The Style Councils are not viewed in the same way as the Jam, for lots of reasons, not least that they’re less blokey. So a certain strand of parodic straw man rockist may make the claim The Style Council Never Existed in the same way that Jamie and refuse to admit Elastic did a second album.
In terms of the coven, there wouldn’t be huge sympathy for any of the above.
Alternatively, I may have also been trolling Eric Stephenson. That sounds like the sort of thing I’d do.
Q: Without giving names have you ever been paired up with an artist whose style you didn’t like? If so how do you work through it?
A: If I ever write a book on comic writing, I suspect a chapter will be about writing for artists. Specifically, the process of taking apart an artist and seeing what they do well, what they do poorly and how that can be put to task. For me, that’s a big part of being a professional comic writer. You do with that with every artist you work with.
That last line is key - it doesn’t really matter if I like the artist I’m working with personally. I just need to try to understand them, what others see in them and why they’re a professional and what they can bring to the work.
(I stress, it doesn’t mean I always succeed, but it’s what I’m trying to do.)
Q: Are there any characters that - at Marvel or in your creator-owned stuff - you wish that you had been able to write more then you did? For whatever it's worth, after Generation Hope 10, I'd love to see you do more with Rachel Summers.
A: Thank you. That was a… fun is the wrong word, but I liked writing her.
(Jamie is a huge Rachel Summers fan, in passing.)
In terms of an actual answer, I’ve hit an odd sanguine position now. I suspect earlier the answer would be “yes,” but now I’m aware if I did more of something else, I’d have done less of the stuff I have done. If I said - say - I’d liked to have stayed a little longer on Uncanny so I could have finally done a UNIT plot and have everyone kick his ass it’d be true, but I also think of the stuff I did instead of staying on Uncanny.
SWORD? I span things out of the book for most of my time at Marvel, but there were stories I really wanted to tell with Abigail and company. I suspect my career looks a little different if we got 3 trades out of SWORD. Get me in the pub at one point, and I’ll tell you how the series would have ended. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house.
Maybe Phonogram? I wish the market was there so we could have done a few more trades earlier, when I was still the sort of person who could write Phonogram. There was always a time limit on that book.
But even there, I can see already me re-arranging the ideas and emotional places I still think are viable and placing them elsewhere. There’s a couple of stories which I may still do, purged of the Phonogram elements. Spangly New Thing is mining some similar emotional terrain to my original idea for a fourth arc of Phonogram, though coming at it from a different angle.
I’m basically lucky. I like seeing what’s next rather than worrying of the stories untold.
Q: I picked up the complete phonograms omni because it had those B-sides that you'd never put in the collections before (and Comixology had it on super duper sale). You wrote in a little preface that besides being an artistic exercise you thought it might spur single issue sales. I was wondering how that thinking has modified if at all when it comes to the WicDiv one shots, which I now make sure to buy even though I trade wait the main series.
A: Good question, this.
They serve different purposes. As you say the B-sides were two things - one part was artistic, and giving us a chance to play and show more angles of the universe. We realised with Rue Britannia that people had all sorts of odd prejudices about music comics, so we wanted to explicitly counteract that. The second part was maybe if the single issues had their own special stuff (and it was genuinely meaningful and bigger and interesting) that it’d move some sales over into single issues. First part worked great. Latter part worked not at all.
The name gives the clue: these are B-sides. The specials aren’t that. The specials are modular chunks of culture.
If the big influence on the B-sides was Deadline magazine, and our desire to do a mini Deadline, the influence on the specials were how some Vertigo series did their specials. Specifically, the Preacher specials, which were spotlights on a character, released separately and eventually collected into their own volume. With Preacher, I did exactly what you did - as in, I regularly picked up specials as I knew they wouldn’t be collected for a long time, and I knew they were core parts of the story.
So we just did it like that.
Looking around for models and their purpose and what worked and what didn’t is a big part of the job for me.
Q: When you finish a book/series do you try not to look back on it? Or do you ever catch yourself thinking about what would have happened to certain characters in following years? Not so much "kill your darlings" as "become estranged from them and they never call unless they need money or a place to crash for the night?"
A: I’ve definitely reached the stage of my comic career that I can be presented with a comic and go “Hah! I haven’t thought about that in years!”
I suspect people would be surprised how little you think of stuff that’s already wrapped, but it’s fairly logical if you pick apart what my actual job is. I’ve been thinking about how I run at the moment - I’m writing STAR WARS, SPANGLY NEW THING, WICDIV, LUDOCRATS, UBER and MODDED. That’s six universes I’m keeping alive at any given time. It doesn’t leave a huge amount of room to play with the past.
I suspect this story may be best to ask me in a few years time, when longer term projects end. My career has basically only ever had mid-length runs. I’ve never done something that’s lived with me for more than two or so years. JIM, Iron Man, Uncanny X-men, Darth Vader all were 30-32 issues, all double-shipping (Including specials and books in other series, etc). That’s a short sharp intense burst of narrative, and different from how Uber and WicDiv have been. Will I musing over the WicDiv missing pantheon story or the Burma campaign or something down the line? God knows. We’ll find out.
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I was hoping I'd have time to actually write a little about the “Who is the director in comics” conversation which has been going around again, but I really should move onto other tasks. Short answer is “whatever the answer is, it's only ever a metaphor and is never going to be 1:1, and a metaphor based upon a not-really-true-idea-of-what-a-director-actually-does with a lot of what-directors-actually-do-varies-consideably is always going to lead you astray.”
The reason why the actual conversation comes back again and is the underlying unstated point of the question. We've got the idea culturally that the Director is the author of a film. Ergo, whoever is most akin to the Director holds the same position in comics. I would definitely ask anyone (and especially a writer) who is defending that they're the sole director to question their actual motivations for doing so. I suspect the answer won't necessarily be pretty.
Heh. That's a fairly long take without actually doing my actual take. I am incorrigible.
(For my money, band is a better metaphor anyway. Group-produced comics are a dialogue between the various roles which is more fluid and non-heirarchial and linear-in-production than the Director model would suggest.)
Work? Has been fine. Jamie has WicDiv 35, which made him laugh as he'd forgotten a plot we were bringing to the boil. Uber 15 is in a first draft, though I want to polish before I give it to Daniel. He's got the opening four pages to keep him going until then. Rather than the fourth issue of Spangly New Thing as I planned, I've decided to clear my deck of smaller pieces – namely, the last three Modded stories and a Thanos short story I said I'd do for the forthcoming Annual. The latter led me to re-reading The Infinity Gauntlet this morning, and smiling a little at it, in terms of “Oh man, this is totally more influential on your early mind than you were aware of.”
What's next? Well, Jim's up for the weekend, for a Ludocrats summit, which basically translates to shouting at one another while playing Warhammer 40k.
Byeeeeee!
Kieron Gillen
London
1.2.2018