072: plotted by a pack of drunk Labradors.
Hullo.
I was going to write something serious here, but I just realised Mitski released a single last week, which has left me all excited. Join me! This is great and... wait, Mitski, not sure about the key change there towards the end, no, wait, I'm liking how it's all kind of falling apart, I'm back in, Mitski, you got me. Wait, I've just realised that it hasn't gone really weird, it's just that I was playing the youtube video at the same time as spotify and the sound was mashing together. I used to be a professional critic. As you can imagine, I was amazing at it.
Contents!
Wars Featuring Stars
Wars Without Stars
Curia and Curia
What do you do if you see a space marine? Park, Marine.
Darkness + Blades Equals
Bye!!!
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The big release of the week is issue 50 (count 'em!) of Star Wars. This starts HOPE DIES, the big centerpiece arc of my run. This is basically six issues of Epic, with human frailty and bravery right at its center. My Star Wars arcs are designed to be modular – sure, they form this arc, but they're also individual movies-on-paper. As such, you can jump on here, if you fancy seeing generally a Rebel/Imperial engagement that dwarfs the Battle of Endor and as many emotions as I can fit into the space. Salva is working hard on this (each issue is basically me apologising for asking him to draw another shot of the fleets) and GuruFX are basically throwing supernovas on the page.
I said that all my arcs are cold entry points? This is perhaps more so. With an issue 50, we know you get different eyes on it, and we went over this with an extremely tight focus making sure we introduce everything you need. The ships move into place and... well, you can imagine. It's not called HOPE HAS A NICE DAY.
I'm also signing tomorrow at Forbidden Planet in London from 6pm until 7pm. Come and say Hi.
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And Uber issue 14. As I'm working so far ahead (Daniel is finishing up issue 17) I had to go back and flick through my scripts to see what actually happened in this issue. Well, mainly more problems on the Eastern Front, and Uber's equivalent of that bit in the latest season of Game of Thrones where cast who've been in the story the whole story finally get to interact directly with one another. Also features one of my favourite Stephanie/Leah scenes in the whole run. Uber is such a pure book in its odd way that you can get some great drama just by putting two people with needs in a room. It's not always exactly a natural form of comics writing in the quasi-mainstream, but I love it when I can pull it off.
For the first time, there's also no letter from me at the back. The print deadline came up when I was travelling, so I wasn't able to write anything. It'll be back next month.
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I've been really interested in Robin Hoelzemann's webcomic, Curia Regis. It's perhaps best described as a fantasy-history story. As in, it's set in a world with close to 18th century tech and social structure... just that it's not ours. There's no fantasy elements except everything is fantasy, and the political drama is all too real. It's deeply ambitious, both in art and story, and that it's such a long piece and Robin has discovered so much along the way, I kept on hoping that she turns her 2018 talents into a smaller, self-contained piece.
So seeing her doing a kickstarter for a stand alone graphic novel, The Witching Hour, pleases me enormously. Honestly, I'd have been happy seeing her do anything, but that she's doing exactly what I was hoping she do is double-plus good. So I got excited and gave her a quote.
“As pristinely beautiful as a snowstorm, as deadly, as chilling. File next to Becky Cloonan’s morbid, unresolved, wonderful fables. File prominently, file with pride.”
That sounds exciting. I'd throw money at that, if I were you.
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I finished up one of my current painting projects, namely a bunch of (primarily) Primaris marines. Look at them above, the sweeties.
I also wrote up my idea for their chapter background, where I go off on one. Go read. Basically, you have to understand my entire life is trying to resist pitching anything at Black Library.
Yes, those are WicDiv logos on their shoulders. The advantage of having print-quality files available is that you can print 'em on transfer paper and lob 'em on.
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Over on Tumblr I've just promised to to write a little about my RPG campaign, so despite the fact this is an oddly long and rambly newsletter, I'm going to write some more, because Shame Compels Me.
I'm playing Blades in the Dark. The players are a gang of crminals in a fantasy-city in the early industrial age, performing capers. It's highly player driven, very non-planning and emergence and highly into the politics and machinations of the band. Thief: The Metal Age meets GTA2, for those who were very into videogames circa 98-00. It certainly has the potential to be 19th century occultpunk The Wire. It can also turn into the keystone anti-cops. Both are a fun time. If you want more, here's Shut Up & Sit Down's review.
Its most-talked-about mechanic is basically one to remove a lot of active pre-planning for a mission. Rather than doing it before, you can flashback during a mission to set something up. There's mechanic costs, but (say) the players seeming to be trapped on the roof, to flashback to having set up a cart full of hay far beneath them is fair game. There's often a mechanic cost, but the aim is to simulate the moment in a heist movie when you think our heroes are totally fucked, but reveal that it was all part of their plan all along. It works really well.
As the mechanic suggests, this puts it in the narrative-first corner of game design. It's trying to make something that feels like scoundrels doing heists in a narrative, rather that everything that would actually entail. It's Danny Ocean in the film rather than Danny Ocean having to spend six months looking at architects plans. I admit, I'm not quite sure I'd file it entirely with the narrative RPG side – it sort of emerges from them, and becomes something I'd describe as narrative simulationism. Its highly systemic and tries to convince with its clockwork world – just the thing it's trying to simulate is how narrative works rather than reality as lived.
But I suspect that's not what I was being asked for. And while I want to talk about the odd dynamic the game has engendered (I've never played a game where I feel more like a player while GMing, if you see what I mean) I suspect you want to hear all the gleeful dumb things the players has done, right?
We're at the point where I've lost count of how many sessions we've played, and the players are generally inexperienced but deeply enthusiastic. Fully half of the core group never played a game before – and when a game is as fluid as Blades in the Dark, that's not necessarily a problem, as there's no prior conditioning to break down. I say "core group." It's been designed so players can drop in and out as commitment demands, and there's a couple of players who've popped in as ringers as need be.
The players are a gang called the Sigil, based in the cellar of a burned out brothel, and their thing is murder. They just immediately insisted on being assassins. I was mildly horrified. They didn't even consider being smugglers or thieves. One look and an everyone agreed that stabbing was their things. Stabbing, mysticism and setting fires in breweries.
I'll save the player descriptions for later, perhaps at the end of the season, but for here's a selection of things which they've got up to.
Kidnap the bisexual leader of the Lampblacks from a bathhouse, storing him in a freezer unit. Eventually they're told to kill him, but instead release them. They didn't want to interfere with the ongoing gangwar that much, and also realised that murdering a queer characters in a literal fridge was a bit on the nose.
(Besides – he was a nice guy. There was that time they all went swallowing drug-infused maggots down by the docks.)
Broke into the house of a witch called the Hack to steal a ghost in a jar. She had half her face carved off, and wears a mask, which she wears over her non-hacked up side. The players have yet to actually see her, but were so scared when they heard her moving around upside, rather than running out the door and risk passing the staircase they spent minutes trying to get the window open to avoid taking another step closer to this shuffling monster.
They also became mortally afraid of a character who is basically a silent Jason Statham in monks robes, who only communicates via whatever blade he's holding. When he decided he liked them, his hand moved from the two-handed blade on his back to the one in his sash around his waist. That didn't last long, as the players murdered his girlfriend, and set fire to the pub she was in for good measure.
Well, the Crows have recently swapped leaders. The current leader murdered the old one. The players know this, as the old leaders' ghost told them. They're under a mission for an organisation of possessor ghosts to secretly release the spirit in the same room as her, and decide the best way to do it is to climb the outside of the Crows' tower and try to seduce her, ala the Milk Tray Man. This involved long range sniping shots of guards, talking another guard into the sincerity of his intentions (to the level where the guard chokes up and says that the player's just made him realise he's taking his wife for granted and has to try harder) and finally making their way to her chamber, only for her to take one look at him and unload a pistol into him.
Deciding the best way to murder someone was to trap them in a pub and burn it down. Their own pub, which they'd spent a session taking over. This is not a plan they exactly thought through.
Last session ended with them sliding a satanic knife into a high-ranking member of another gang, to see them become seemingly possessed by the spirit of the pyromanic satanic Grandmother of one of the players. They're also being haunted by eleven burning spectres from the pub. I'm sure the players will be find a fine way out of the predicament, and not immediately turn to their usual methodology of piling on top of their target stabbing them to death and then setting fire to the pub they happen to be in.
In short, our campaign is both bleak and often darkly funny, as if the godfather was being plotted by a pack of drunk Labradors.
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I'll tell you something perverse. I believe I said my motivation was generally low last week. I got stuff done that I had to, but in terms of drive, there was nothing there. I was floating along and hating myself and everything. I basically wrote five new pages of comics.
Then I hit Saturday, wake up early, write a eight page short, work out, do a bunch of housework and a bunch of other stuff. As soon as we were on a day I wasn't scheduled to work, I worked. I think my down state was basically in a petulant schoolboy mode, not wanting to work solely because I should be doing it.
This week has started far better, powered by a different axis of insecurity. I promised I'd write a short story for a charity sci-fi anthology a month or two ago. It's with a bunch of Genuine Real Prose Writers. It's got an entirely open remit. This petrified me, and while I've been thinking about it, I've also been avoiding doing it. This week, over deadline, the shame that made me not want to do it was exceeded by the shame of being late for something. You can literally plot these two lines on a graph, and when one exceeded the other, I changed my course of action. This is basically how a Sims character works. I am a poor simulation of a human.
I mention this, as people often ask me how I motivate myself as a freelance writer. Being consciously aware of some of the above helps. What's the thing which is stopping you doing something? What are its antagonistic forces? What can you do to increase one and decease the other.
All of which is to say I managed to pull together a first draft of it this morning, and will be prodding it over the next few days, passing it to a few friends for a read over the weekend and mailing it to the editor on Monday. Assuming all goes well. Why would anything go wrong now?
Other stuff has mainly been starting to go through the 24 Panels open submissions which are a startling selection of work. It's always a relief with open submissions to find you've got not only sufficient submissions, but sufficient really great submissions to do a strong anthology. I've also been talked into doing an introduction for it, in the form of comics. As editor, I'm always twitchy over being included, but something in Spartan comics explain what the project was seemed to make sense. I've mailed it to an old friend, and hope he'll be drawing it in the next week or two.
It's also Pulling Together WicDiv 38 week, and Jamie's inks are popping into the Dropbox and starting to pass from Dee to Matt for colouring. C and I have been doing lettering drafts to nail down some of the difficult material in the issue – the steps only get ever more delicate as the arc ends. It seems to be in a good state, however. We'll see.
(I also have the Writer Notes to do – probably written this week, but I'm unsure how long it'll take to go through production.)
That's enough for now. Look after yourself.
Byyyyyeeee!
Kieron Gillen
London
4.7.2018