107: abandoned shelf of shame
Hullo.
I’m not sure how I lived to be 43 years old and not seen Smokey Robinson being harassed by the letter U on Sesame Street, but I’ve now seen it, and I live in hope there’s something else as good in the world I’ve yet to see. There’s always hope.
(Discovered via the always good Chart Music podcast)
Contents!
Show and tell
Doggies
Face
Links
Answers
Byyyyeeee!!!
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As I joked on twitter, the Endgame that you don’t need to pee in the middle of. Two issues to go after this, so you can imagine there’s a lot of answers, and reminders of questions and a bunch of other stuff. I likely have more to say, but I suspect it better save for the notes. It’s one of the ones where you balance the various needs of an issue. I said to a friend earlier, “It is possible we over-complicated this book” at which point everyone in the whole world turns towards the camera and say “DO YOU THINK!?!??!”
But there’s some wonderful stuff in here from the whole team. I couldn’t be prouder of them. Bringing a monster like this in to land is like nothing else.
(And Latour’s cover! This was amazing to see how he put together, and continued to basically tweak and explore what he wanted. Fascinating creator, Jason.)
Also, new printings of DIE 2 and 3 (4th and 3rd printings respectively). A second printing of 4 reached the shops two weeks ago, with the fifth printing of 1 last week, and the second printing of fifth next week. So (er) all should be available, basically. RPGs have traditionally had too many numbers in, so this RPG comic doing the same thing seems oddly appropriate.
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Talking about DIE, Forbes revealed the first arc from the second arc. One panel’s above, and there’s more in the link.
I also lobbed this on twitter, which is the front page for issue 6’s script. With creator owned books, there has been a historical tendency for me to play with the title page and choose fonts to give each document its own ambience. It’s all ritual – as in, nonsense, but often effective nonsense. If I open a document and it explicitly reminds me of What It Is I can switch gears a little easier. Also, making a title page is a great way to waste time.
DIE’s title page, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a little over formal. After the off the cuff street gang vibe of WicDiv, I wanted to go completely the different way.
Of course, I may end up changing the title. But will I correct the grammar?
Bought two nearly identical sets of glasses today, which are nearly identical to the ones I already own. I am at home with my own iconic resonance and/or very lazy.
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Links!
On Sunday 30th June I’m speaking at the Bradford Literary Festival, being interviewed by the ever-excellent David Barnett. Tickets available now.
Editor and Comics Guerrilla Juliette Capra had an idea. She’s suggesting a re-read and discussion of all of WicDIv as we head towards the final issue. There’s a weekly schedule, and a hashtag to discuss it. And it starts (er) today. Cripes! More details here and the hashtag is #onceagainwereturn.
Issue 4 of Thunderbolt went down well. Here’s a hell of a deep dive review into it, which walks through a lot of the ideas.
As I’m entering the leaving-Star-Wars period, there’s cute round up articles. Marvel asked me what my five favourite moments in my Star Wars run was, and I told ‘em.
I answered a bunch of questions on tumblr this week. Ask away, obv.
How do you think putting out that teaser strip for Die effected the sales of the first issue/marketing for the series as a whole?
The big heartbreaker in comics marketing: you don’t know.
It’s a one time experiment. You only get one set of data, so it’s impossible to draw conclusions from it. It’s like… do interviews gain any orders at all? I don’t know. The only thing circa WicDiv which was believed to reliably push numbers was creator outreach to retailers. Is that still true circa DIE’s release. I had no idea. Things change. Retailers used to only like being called and never read e-mails. Circa WicDIv, e-mails were then preferred, etc.
So the preview got passed around, got some nice articles and was a useful device when trying to sell the book. Did any of that actually change the orders?
I don’t know.
However this is the stinger: if you don’t do any one bit of the marketing, and the orders come in shit, you’ll be trapped thinking “Maybe if I did that one extra thing, the numbers would be better.” So you do everything, never really knowing if it changes anything, but knowing that you’ll kick yourself if it actually does, and you didn’t do it.
If DIE is going to close at 20 issues, then mechanically some facets of the D20 world are only going to be glimpsed at - our short look at Little England may be all we get to see in the comic. But then, I was thinking: is the DIE RPG book going to be illustrated? By whom? Is it going to fill some of the gaps left by the comic (well obviously, it will - e.g. all Emotion Knight classes will be described), but is it going to fill gaps on the imagery side? Thank you.
It’s likely we won’t visit all the regions of DIE during the series. As you note, it’s a big place. I suspect we’ll have a map sooner rather than later though.
The initial beta RPG won’t include anything but a sketch of the world, for reasons which will be clear in the Beta (plus “we’re still doing the comic” and “that really is a lot to just give away as a freebie. It’s already 70,000 words.”) It does include a lot of details about all the classes. There’s one emotion knight ability which hasn’t been used in the comic yet that I’m chewing over whether or not to include in the initial Beta.
If we ever do a full RPG down the line, it’d include all of the stuff you’d expect, which would certainly include some detailing of the regions. I’m also considering doing a gazeter, like the one Hickman did for East of West.
I have no idea what the art on a collected trade will be - I suspect at least some stuff will be repurposed from the comic, and depending on how it’s funded, have more art done especially. We really do have a lot of cool art, between all the covers and the interiors.
In Singles Club, Kohl warns off Lloyd from “sitting here, trying to write yourself into a better story…” At the same time, writing Phonogram was a big part of how you got to be a Major Comics Writer, and it worked. Is it that Lloyd’s Master Plan isn’t actually creation, but the same criticism within a creation aesthetic?
Oh, nothing in Phonogram worked :)
I think there’s a tension between the intents of Phonogram and the intent of WicDiv, and mostly their subject matters. Phonogram is about the person I was before writing Phonogram. WicDiv is about how that person came to write Phonogram and where it got me.
Of course, Singles Club’s structure is so broad that it’s also a bad idea to take any single statement as definitive. Kohl and Emily get to talk to someone a decade younger than they are, and in a similar place to they were a decade ago, and give some advice - which is, like all such advice, really them talking to themselves.
I think Kohl’s advice would be best paraphrased as “Loosen up.”
That said, you’re right Kohl’s moderate infamy in the Phonogram universe is 100% based around what he did in Rue Britannia, which is a metaphor for the success of Rue Britannia’s impact on my life and how people saw me.
In which case the advice would be “Do not believe for a second this will solve your problems.”
It’s a messy book, written by someone who’s been long time dead, and I don’t agree with that guy on many subjects. You tell me.
Shouldn’t Angela have used a single equals sign when giving the attack order? She’s assigning a value to the Attack Glass Town variable, not making a comparison.
Yes, which was a facepalm after it had gone to press. I’m really not sure how I did that, because I was coding in bloody gamemaker at the time, which has exactly the = to assign == to compare stricture. I mean, I fuck around with enough software that maybe I got something mixed up? It’s an odd one.
It’s among the (blessedly few) things I’m tweaking for the trade.
Is Sahkmet ever going to get her headshot cover?
SPOILERS IN ANSWER – SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION IF YOU HAVEN’T READ TO THE END OF IMPERIAL PHASE.
The return to the headshots in the 4th year was something we only decided on at the end of year three - returning to the beginning as we return to the end. At the end of the first year, we saw we hadn’t done Minerva, Cassandra or Sakhmet, and had plans to do them as publicity pieces for the French release. Deadlines ate that up, so we left it. All the characters got spotlight covers in year 2 and 3.
However, when we returned to them with year 4, Sakhmet had exited the plot. As such, as covers have to do with the contents of the issue, it meant there was no opportunity to do so. We did talk about it, but we felt it would be both cruel and deceptive to put Sakhmet on the cover of an issue she isn’t in.
So, what we want to do is try and get the headshot done and then either just put it online, or include it in the final trade or something. It’s a missing part of the machine, and we want to do it.
The problem here is deadlines. As we’ve talked about before, Jamie is dealing with chronic pain as he completes this book. As such, adding anything to the workload may be simply be impossible.
But if we can, we will.
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The week has been a perverse mix of productive and lax, which is kind of how I like it. I’ve spent basically two weeks of the no-imminent deadlines clearing the frankly astounding amount of minor work that have backed up, and started this week by diving into issue 3 of Once & Future. I’m writing my daily pages, and then moving onto other things, and generally getting stuff done while still having space for doing stuff I’d like to do. I’m not organised enough to keep this up, but in weeks like this, I wish I was.
(Hell, this marking stuff off my checklist even expands to my miniature painting, where I’ve worked through everything in the half done and abandoned shelf of shame, officially freeing me up for New Stuff.)
And I’m also letting go of old projects. I was lying in bed this morning for about ten or fifteen minutes thinking about bits and pieces before I remembered it was WicDiv release day. It’s as key issue as any of the biggest issues of WicDiv. It’s not as big a twist as 33, but in terms of the mythology, it’s up there, and while I was stressed for weeks over 33, 43 I’ve become more philosophical. WicDiv is what WicDiv is and we cannot change it now. In terms of a capacity to be sanguine, it’s what I was trying to teach myself but it’s strange to see it work.
This hasn’t stopped me refreshing the internet for comments, of course.
Main social gathering was heading to Eastercon on Saturday where I (er) stayed in the bar? And then went to dinner, and went back to the bar. I did try to go to panels, I swear. I also ate one of Tor’s excellent cupcakes. I am serious writer.
Right – let’s send this off and get back to going through the PDF of the first DIE trade to make sure it’s in place. Rian and Chrissy have really been working on making a genuinely striking package. This is a fun time, sometimes. I have to write it down to re-read around 2am on a Friday night and everything’s gone wrong, to show it’s not always like this.
Kieron Gillen
London
24.4.2019