086: we have cats.
Hullo.
I'd say Happy Goth Christmas except my coven decided Goth Christmas is actually Christmas Eve, because on Christmas Eve 1764 The Castle of Otranto was published, which kicked the whole goth thing off. Yes, I've been hanging out with goths this week, why did do you ask?
Contents!
Dark Future
Dark Past
Dark Ray Fawkes
Er... some stuff.
Dark Links
Dogs
Cats
Bye!!!
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I was asked by Gary Whitta to be part of this, which is an anthology of dystopian Science-fiction short stories, with all at least 50% of each sale going towards the ALCU. There’s details and links to where to buy it here – both ebook and paper. It also debuted in the current ALCU-supporting books bundle over at Humble Bundle, which has a bunch of good other stuff in too. Gary’s done an interview about the project over here.
If you’ve been following my work in the last year or so, you’ve likely been aware of slowly playing with more prose. The Aphra short. The Scion intro fic. WicDiv 1923. Hell, even this newsletter is based on the awareness that my prose has atrophied since I stopped games journalism, because the writing in a script takes a completely different purpose. Even with the above, this was intimidating. The Anthology has a bunch of Real Prose Writers I Respect in it, and I am a guy who just writes overlong captions.
But as nerve-wracking as I found it, it was fun. I like what we turned up with. Here’s how it starts…
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THE ARC BENDS
I died, in the hope I would get better. It seemed like a sensible thing to do.
It was the 21st century. Lots of things seemed to be the sensible thing to do, and so we did them. It’s only common sense. Over the centuries, I’ve come to understand that this belief is one of humanity’s more constant attributes, certainly more constant than any of the content of “common sense” itself. I’m sorry. I’m going to wax philosophical. This behaviour was encouraged between then and now. I’m following my best, only legal advice.
As far as the early 21st century went, I knew I was lucky. I had a nationality (American), a career (accountancy, corporate), insurance (work based, surprisingly comprehensive), savings (some), property (house), a wife (short, enthusiastic, liked tropical fish, 1990s sitcoms, me), children (child one who liked me, child two who hated me, child three who liked me. I felt that was pretty good going), etc. Unfortunately, I was born inside a human body whose faults include serious lower back pain, mysterious earwax build-up in my left ear and being a human body.
I remember seeing quizzes like “what do you hate about your body?” and blinking when people answered things like “my nose” or “my wrists”. The only answer which made any sense was “a tendency to start to degrade from the late teens, slowly lose function and stop working entirely within one hundred years tops.”
I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand when my first pet died (cat, ginger, angry). I didn’t understand when my first friend died (teenage car-crash, no drinking, deeply unfair). I didn’t understand when my parents died (mercifully late, relatively painless). I didn’t understand when I saw famines on the news or shootings in the streets (constantly). I just didn’t understand. And I always thought two things simultaneously…
This shouldn’t happen.
This shouldn’t happen to me.
In short, my mid-life crisis started early, and kept on going. I had many weaknesses as a human, but you can’t say I didn’t commit. Eventually my perpetual mid-life crisis actually met my lucky mid-life, which meant I had some money to throw at the problem in hope it would just go away.
I sidestepped most of the well-worn, traditional methods. I didn’t buy the latest model of car or try to date a young model or experiment with plastic surgery. I didn’t leave my wife. I didn’t go on a ludicrous health kick, though I continued to eat more kale than I’d have strictly speaking liked (a fact which I would come to regret).
I already had a gym membership. I decided to join another club, with a similar aim. Both promised a longer life. Their methodology varied. My gym believed that the aim would be achieved by having a twenty-something shout at me to lift metal objects up and down, while my other club leaned towards decapitating my head and lobbing it in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
It takes all sorts.
I’d read the literature. Scientific opinion was distinctly mixed. Some argued that revival would only work if the decapitation happened before you died, which would require euthanasia to be legal, which it wasn’t where I came from. It was likely a waste of time, and people thought this was a lot of money to spend just to end up as a minty-fresh head-sicle. I didn’t really care. A chance was all I was looking for.
Religious people don’t really know if their afterlife of choice exists. Just the possibility makes the likelihood of absolute eternal non-existence a little more palatable. In the same way, the idea that I had a vat of liquid nitrogen of my very own was a comfort. It didn’t matter if it likely wouldn’t work. It might, and that hope was all I needed. Anyway: I was only still relatively young, life-expectancies were rising and who knew what new technologies would arise in the decades of happy life I had ahead of me?
“Look out for that car!”
“What car?”
Dead.
And then onwards into over five-thousand (count ‘em!) words of the adventures of a decapitated head. The story was inspired when having dinner with some writers friends, and one of them couldn’t see the downside of cryo-freezing your head. Suffice to say, I was happy to imagine one for him.
*
The only comic out this week is UBER: INVASION 17 where we go back to the Pacific Theatre for a day out in Tokyo. This issue Daniel reworked my script to do some lovely things juxtaposing the briefing with the actual raid, which works really well. There’s a couple of errors in the art we’ll fix for the trade. I’ll give this as a real bit of advice – one armed and one-handed characters are literally a nightmare for artists. Almost every single one I’ve added to a book – Siegmund, Maria, Tyr, Hela, probably more – has ended up with a panel where it’s re-appeared. Comics!
This will be the last Uber for a while, for a variety of reasons. I’ll keep you up to date what the plans for the last four issues will be. Consider the end of this issue as an end-of-arc break, basically. As in, as soon as I know something, you will too.
In December, Image are doing charity variant covers to go to the Hero Initiative. The theme is Gifts.
We asked King Goth Ray Fawkes to do one, and there’s clearly one obvious gift with an obvious price. Obvious, and oh-so right. Speak to your retailer if you want one.
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Busy time for new stuff, actually.
Firstly, Hope Nicholson is editing an anthology Pros And (Comic) Cons, which is a collection of stories (both prose and comics) about conventions and what they mean for us. It’s out May 29th 2019, and can be pre-ordered from all the pre-ordering places in the world. I’m doing a short story with Teutonic Titan Jules Scheele and it’s the Oral History Of The Thought Bubble Dance Floor. You’ve likely heard me rave about this event before, but this brings together a few of my favourite anecdotes, with a lovingly drawn crowd-scenes from Julia, who has been present on every single one. I think. Here’s a couple of panels.
Secondly, I’m doing a story for the Shout Out anthology, which will be coming to Kickstarter in November. In short: genre stories for a young queer audience by queer teams. I’m working with the enormously talented V. Gagnon on a short romantic action story about gay vikings. She’s just put up a couple of panels online, so you can admire them here…
Also, in the January solicits, PETER CANNON: THUNDERBOLT is in it, so go speak to your retailer about that if you want one. Here’s Paulina Ganucheau’s cover which is just great.
Man, there’s a lot of retailer talking in these newsletters right now. I hope you get on with your retailer.
A lot of links this week. This is what happens if I have a week off.
Legendary game designer – both in his standing and how his work so often centered around the concept of legends - Greg Stafford passed, and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff did an excellent hour long episode about him. Recommended.
My friend, cartoonist and generally the closest comics has to Maria From The Sound Of Music in terms of pure loveliness, Emma Viecelli is writing the new comic based on the videogame Life is Strange. Here’s its trailer. It looks great.
Marguerite Bennet gives smart advice about breaking into the comic book industry.
The Brooklyn Burlesque performance The Naked And The Sublime looks amazing. We love seeing people explore the work like this.
Editor/Poet Chrissy Williams is interviewed about the first year since her collection Bear came out. Good stuff.
I suspect Multiversity are the premier comics-only site online now, so I was pleased to see their Wicked Intervention column return, unpacking Lucifer and Amaterasu. This sort of writing as we head towards the end is interesting to see.
Bombsheller’s leggings have been going fantastically, but I loved to see them write about the Behind The Scenes Making Of of it all. Yet more wonderful photos too.
Jeannette Ng’s essay on about those worried they may be appropriative in their work is really good.
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Comps arrived for The Wicked + the Divine: The Funnies. Out next week. Part of me wished we did call it THE WICKED + THE CANINE, as it is a terrible pun. That said, terrible puns are pretty well taken care of inside.
I haven’t mentioned Romesh Ranganathan has written a story for it, have I? Let’s mention it now.
We have cats.
****
It’s been busy. I always tend to say this, but it’s more so. There’s an array of deadlines which are all contracting around me like the Garbage Crusher in Star Wars, and my only hope is that I can write R2D2 quickly enough to get out of it. It’s do-able, but its tense. I’ve given orders to a friend to make sure I don’t drink too much tomorrow night, as I can’t afford to be slow and weak on Friday. I must be strong! Strong like ox!
At least it’s not the hardest-of-all-hard deadlines of Saturday, where I was a key note Speaker at Sheffield Gothic’s Re-imagining the gothic. When you have to step on stage at a certain time, you can’t even try to go into bartering and crying mode. With everything else I was doing, while I was working on ideas, I didn’t actually start writing my speech until Friday, which resulted me generating 7000 words about my fraught relationship with the gothic in less than two days. It seems to go do well, and everyone I met (and all the work I heard presented) were amazing. I’ll likely include it in this newsletter at some point, though likely broken into two sections. I talked about a bunch of stuff I have never talked about before, primarily late-00s pitches that never went anywhere.
One reason why I couldn’t start on THAT was because I had to break the back of issue one of PROJECT OH CAROLINA. I mailed that off to the editor in question yesterday, and I am awaiting his thoughts. I suspect his thoughts will be backing away slowly, before he realises the door is shut, and I’m not trapped in here with him, he’s trapped in here with me. I think it’s fun. It’s a project that sits in the Doctor Aphra part of my work, basically, and I’ve enjoyed the characters as much as I hoped I would. The magic is always finding whether the voice is there or not, and whether the character has things to say about the world. On that level, at least, I’m happy.
I’ve also moved into the Final Hyping Of Die Before Pre-Order Cut Of so I’m running a fascinating array of anxieties. I’ll try to write about what that actually means next week – suffice to say, speaking to your retailer or pre-ordering digitally would be excellent, and may salve my fretting nature.
In short: I haven’t done this for five years, and I remembered last time the book got so under my skin, I thought it was a good idea to do a photo comic of how to pre-order. I fear where this time could lead.
Byeeeeee!
Kieron Gillen
London
31.10.2018