071: a comedy Kelvin trying to find absolute zero
Hullo.
I forgot to say this last week, but I had several folk point out Olympia absolutely was released as a single. Thankfully Alex, the first, also gave me the reason why I had remembered it off. As in, it was the last single from the first album, and that I had been saying "This must be a single!" for all their existence, so by then, the pub-rant rather than fact got stuck in my head. Humans!
Contents!
WicDiv
Pundamental Inhuman Writes
Sigmar
Bye!!!
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One comic this week, The Wicked + the Divine 37. Erica Henderson provides the alt cover, as seen above, which is just a revelation. First time I think we’ve seen Gentle Annie on the cover too. Preview here. Available digitally from comixology and Image and probably other places, as we live in the future.
It is (as traditional for this bloody arc) a big issue, in a literal sense too. We added eight pages to the print run to try something. The only time we did that was with issue 8, in the rave issue. Issue 1 was over-sized, but that was because it was more comic pages, rather than issue 8 (and this one’s) fairly extreme time-shifting effect on an issue’s standard material. We always (with a few rare exceptions where we do an extra page or two) have twenty pages of comics every issue. Anything more than us is cheating, trying to think laterally to get effects. That WicDiv is our baby mean we can go further, even if it costs us money. We really don’t take the stage WicDiv gives us for granted. I remember writing at the end of The Singles Club that the scariest thing was that we may never get to do something like this ever again. We’ve been lucky, and enjoy leaning into it.
The issue itself? A big set-piece issue, where a plot reaches one of its crucial points.
Oh – I also did the Writer Notes for issue 36, which you’ll find here. Just shy of 6000 words, which proves that this issue never actually stops being work. Basically a bunch on the research and the choices.
Finally, Amazon put up the solicit for the eigth WicDiv trade. This is the trade which collects the Specials, out February 2019. It’s called OLD IS THE NEW NEW. And, yes, now there’s a timer on us deciding what the final trade is called.
Do you follow me on twitter? If so, I’m sorry.
Two major new creative directions happened in 2014. One was The Wicked + the Divine. The other was that I started compulsively punning on twitter. Bad punning. Quite aggressively trying to find ways to be bad in specific ways. I’m actually interested in what responses it gets. The ratio of likes to retweets is always interesting, but what I really note is the ratio of comments to likes. As in, the number of people who are moved to actively engage and shout at me by their sheer level of awfulness. In many ways, I’m a comedy Kelvin trying to find absolute zero. It’s out there.
Anyway – that’s a long way around to saying that I’ve been throwing out a lot of puns in the last few weeks. This is normally a bad sign – it’s one of my coping and distracting mechanisms – but I’m mining an odd vein of wordplay here. They’re kind of beyond puns now. Or beneath. Beneath. Definitely, beneath.
Anyway. A selection of recent horrors.
I suspect the best one I’ve ever done was…
Which I google and see that folks are sticking on T-shirts and using in memes and has over 180,000 interaction-y things on tumblr in the post someone grabbed me from. The pun I liked most which did relatively badly was the one where I photoshoped two-thousand and eighteen goalposts together in a single image, and included the caption “2018 Goals.” Sadly, resolution meant it was almost impossible to see what it was.
When I deleted my tweets a year or so back, I actually did back up everything, so my backlog of shit puns were saved. Perhaps I’ll make a book people can buy as gifts for their enemies. Let’s hope I don’t hate humanity that much.
I made a brief appearance in my friends’ at Shut Up And Sit Down’s news section to talk about Age of Sigmar. I wish I said something that I think they’re doing a starter kit in a really interesting way – I’d previously talked about how Sigmarites are being designed to be easy to paint effectively with basic techniques, and pairing them up with ghosts (white, add wash, drybrush) is a way to reduce the barrier there. A tabletop wargame is different than most games, as they have to worry about accessibility on multiple dynamics. Normal games think of User Interface, manuals, complexity, ease of learning versus depth and so on. Tabletop Wargame do that, but also have the whole craft side. Having miniatures that are as easy as possible to look decent in a starter kit strikes me as a good idea.
In other notes, here’s a picture of me entirely breaking my “must paint one unit before moving onto the next” rule…
There’s also a whole bunch of Necron outside the house, immersed in Dettol to strip paint. Basically, the main thing in the house over the last few days has been a constant smell of anti-septic.
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I was actually off on holiday last week. Went off with family into a shared house and lay in the sun and was generally amazed at the quality of two-euro Lidl bottles of wine. I read a bunch, but I’ll save the book reviews for next time. I did find myself reading a Jack Reacher novel that was lying around, in hope to remove the thought that always enters my mind when I see his name in pop culture. As in, “Jack Reach-around.” It didn’t work. It’s still there, and now it’s in your head too.
As the amount of puns show, I’m in a listless place. I’ve got a deadline approaching on Friday, which means I have to polish up a Star Wars script I just finished. It’s the penultimate issue of Hope Dies, which has been oddly relaxing to write for such a piece of heroic action. I’ve got a short prose story I’ve promised to write for an Sci-fi anthology, which is a little intimidating – it’s alongside a bunch of Real Prose Writers, so I am the dumb kid. There’s a couple of other short comics I also should write, as they’re relatively limited work. I’m lining up my thinking for a couple of new minis, have to polish the last issue of Mothering Invention. I’d probably do that as soon as I finish writing this. I’ve been avoiding it, as it’s both intense and emotionally delicate, requiring a lot of precision. If my head’s not in the game, that’s a problem.
The most exciting thing is getting the first lettering draft of Project Spangly New Thing. I think it’s good. It’ll be polished across the months, but with a couple of minor tweaks, it’s in a state I’d show anyone with no caveats. I really can’t wait to show this monster to you.
Byyyyyeeee!
Kieron Gillen
London
27.5.2018