088: wine and cheese
Hullo.
This week - mainly links and art, I think. I haven't ever done a big art preview here before. Let's do a big art preview. If you're reading on the phone, push it close to your nose.
Contents!
Canon
Forbidden
Links
Bye!!!
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I've talked about PETER CANNON: THUNDERBOLT a little before. Let's show the opening in its present, playfully formalist, gleeful state, as the introduction always says a lot about what a book does and how it chooses to do it.
Line art by Caspar Wijngaard. Colours by Mary Safro. Letters from Hassan Otsane-Elhaou. Wordy stuff by me.
For once, I'm not going to reduce the image size, and I think you need to be able to read 'em.
Out January. Order code for the main cover is NOV181059 but speak to your retailer. If you wantr to know more, here's an interview over at Dynamite and here's one over at Previews World. Oh - Rich Johnson lured me to the National Portrait Gallery with wine and cheese to record us basically talk Peter Cannon, and (er) basically everything else. There's a lot of DIE here as well.
It's very much a book I'm talking around what it is and what it does, so a lot of tease. I'm looking forward to actually talking a bit more when folks have had a chance to read the first issue.
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DIE launches December the 5th, and Stephanie and I are doing a signing at Forbidden Planet London on Thursday December 6th between 6 and 7. Forbidden Planet have done their own variant to celebrate, as seen above.
Details of it here, including ability to order the above cover.
As this was the week of DIE pre-order hype, a lot of things where Stephanie and I talk DIE have gone up.
Here’s a chat over at Dynamic Forces. Here’s talking to Women Write About Comics. Here’s Comic Book HQ interviewing us both in the podcast format, which is always fun, as you can hear Stephanie and my respective accents causing chaos.
The Writer Notes for The Wicked + the Divine 1373 (i.e. the Nun one). Go read.
This profile of Kim Joy of Bake Off fame just rehydrated me with life.
Simon Price writes about it being 25 years since the Wu-Tang’s Enter The 36 Chambers. Huge album for me when I got it back in 94 when I got it.
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I have passed through The Week. I am now hung, suspended, in the gap between “pre-orders on DIE 1 being closed” and “Us being told pre-orders on DIE. It is a time. I’m relatively relaxed about it. Relatively being the key word, of course, but all that could be done, has be done. The Die is cast.
That was on Monday, which means that the overload of the work has pressed into this week. This week is slowly reducing the pressure of work back to normal. I’ve still got more on than usual, but by next Monday I should be down at the basic “This is what my life is like” shape. The ballon is now merely taut instead of about to pop. The relief is a high, but you’re aware it’s only a high because it was deeply unpleasant and it’s now stopped.
I have been free enough to stop and look up at my calendar of more than a week away, which led to me basically planning out the options of how to spend the rest of my year. I’m finishing Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt 2 at the moment, and then a couple more Star Wars scripts before the end of the month. Which basically leaves December free, to arrange as I wish. Another WicDiv and Thunderbolt? Sure. But there’s basically three issues worth of work time I can do whatever I wish with. Part of me wants to press on to the end of my Star Wars arc. The other part wonders whether writing to WicDiv’s penultimate issue may be a good way to end the year. I know I want to leave the final issue for a while, as it’s an epilogue, but WicDiv’s core scripts being “done” as 2018 clicks around does have its appeal.
It’s good to have options. The last month has been solely Have To Do rather than Choose To Do. I’ve got a little open water and I can set a course.
Anyway – want to go and have a look at Stephanie’s pencils for DIE 5 again, because I’m amazed with what she’s done with this god’s look. It is startling.
Byeeeeee!
Kieron Gillen
London
14.11.2018