152: #releasethegentleeyescut
Hullo.
As a working critic, one of my standard pieces of advice was to just start writing and then inevitably cut the extraneous opening. It’s good advice, but I never followed it, as if I cut the extraneous opening, my reviews would just be the title of whatever I was reviewing followed by 73%.
Mining
Sealed with an x, and a panel, and another panel.
Culture
Fantheon
Pickyture
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
*****
News broke that Diamond are starting to ship books on May 20th. It’s early days yet, but in terms of when my various books should come out, these are what I’ve been told so far.
LUDOCRATS #1: On Sale 5/20
LUDOCRATS #2: On Sale 6/17
ONCE & FUTURE #8: On Sale 6/17
DIE #11: On Sale 6/24
DIE #12: On Sale 7/22
Ludocrats and Once & Future should be monthly after that. With DIE, we’re still looking at the schedule, and working out what is going to be possible. This has hit everyone hard, so there may be some changes.
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The new issue of the Eisner Award Winning PanelxPanel drops today. Normally it’s digging into a new release in a month, so in a response to the current situation, it’s shifted to a more general topic. Specifically, Number 1s. So half the issue is based around writing about #1s specifically or generally, with the other half the usual download of regulars.
Hassan asked me to write about what makes an issue 1 work, so I did a take on the material I originally downloaded here and then did a walk through a selection of my number ones, and talked about what worked, what didn’t, what were my goals and whatever. I mean, clearly it’s egotistical, but it allows a little more candidness than if I was taking apart someone else’s. I don’t get to play blades out critic any more with anyone else but me.
But I had fun, even though Hassan deleted the stuff about his gentle eyes (#releasethegentleeyescut) and hopefully you will too. I love doing this stuff, and could have happily done it for another 5000 words. Yes, I wrote a lot.
It’s available to buy at 5pm BST, according to gumroad, so will likely be available just after I press send on this, depending how fast I type and how little I can be bothered to spellcheck.
(The former is “Very fast” the latter is “Very little”, btw.)
What Culture have I been jamming into my head?
The defining TV show of this period if Come Dine With Me, which is basically every lunchtime in the house. It’s got into my head so much I’m genuinely making notes towards making a Come Dine With Me RPG. The only significant new TV we’re watching is Killing Eve, which has at least one blackly great comic beat from Jodie Comer an episode, so still holding my attention.
We had tickets for the Royal Vic’s Endgame performance, which they swapped for a streamed performance. I’m not a Beckett expert, so it was my first experience with it, and it was just a great piece of absurdist joy. I also was surprised to discover exactly how many liberties Marvel took with the cinematic conversion.
There’s been a lot of new music in the last two weeks. Tin King is the one that I’ve been circling around, and that was before I even realised the video was an incredible fantasy sequence of someone actually walking around London. The video is well chosen, in its elegantly wasted dérive around Hoxton feeling a lot like how its record circles, from place to place, going nowhere magnificently. The rest of the Ultraísta album Sister is also worth your attention.
No novels, but have been working my way through the enormous Omnibus of Batman Black & White, which is just a sweeping body of work. The short isn’t exactly at the core of the American media, but to see all these big names take a swing in a space is a fascinating gazetteer of the form – or at least, the form as it applies to the Batman. That I’m writing “Batman” with the “The” says how impressive it is.
RPG stuff? I’m actually playing in a Band of Blades campaign, which has hit episode 4, which is interesting how it’s used Blades in the Dark’s innovations for a bleakly military-survival game. I’m running a 3 parter of HEART which ends tomorrow, which has been a weird-fantasy hoot full of serious conversations about D4 Cheese versus D6 Cheese versus D10 cheese, and Vampires rendered immobile by sucking on the wrong eternal vein. Plus the DIE campaign has hit episode 12, which is really getting deep into it, and leading to some codification of some of the classes… but this is strictly speaking work, so is my cue to move onto the next section.
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I mentioned the #NTYCBD tag in a previous newsletter, but Tara Ferguson has expanded it into a full twitter account, where they’re also tweeting videos of creators talking about a book. I did one, as any excuse to pretend to be a critic. By which I mean, ramble. Go watch here, and see me try to talk about Pantheon, and my face of horror as realise that I’m going to have to try and describe exactly what Set is doing in the random panel I opened on. I’m not even able to write about it here. It is a lot.
Stephanie just tweeted this with “Trying Something.” I love seeing Stephanie try things. Her restlessness as a creator remains inspiring.
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Insider Art is a new comics anthology that’s just been announced in aid of women and NB comic shop owners. More details here. There’s an enormous number of amazing creators attached to this, and I can’t wait to support it.
In other helping-retailers notes, the Creators4Creators auctions went incredibly. They’ve just announced the total, and over $430,000 was raised in support of retailers. That’s an incredible achievement. My two auctions went particularly well – Ludocrats issue 1 went for $350 and the DIE game went for $1200. The former is in the post (and I threw in a script for issue 1 as well) and the latter is being arranged at the moment. It was particularly impressive as two strangers came together and bid together, which is prisoner’s dilemma set up I am very pro to see in anything related to DIE.
Now to work out what to run. Erk.
The Comics Lounge did a big interview with me, unpacking basically everything that’s going on at the moment. Heart remains on sleeve, even as the blood seeps through the fabric. Go read.
Wanna see and hear me yabber? Chris Arrant interviewed me for the Libcomix Creators Interview series. This was done early in lockdown, so is very much that first response to all of this. I’ve known Chris ever since the early days, so if memory serves, this was a very relaxed interview. Also it was after 11 at night, and I was visibly falling asleep as we started, only for the adrenaline to kick in as the stream started streaming.
Dynamite lobbed some first issues online for free, including Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt.
I didn’t cut and paste nearly enough of them into this document, but I was pleased to see that there was quite a few review of ONCE & FUTURE volume 1 go live in this period. I’ve said before, but more conversation around trade releases would be such a healthy thing to see more of. Here’s Broken Frontier’s. Also, it was Diamond’s top selling trade of March, which is a hell of a thing. Still available from shops.
AIPT asked me to do a very dumb questionnaire of the sort of questionnaires we did on Liverjournal and mailing lists back in the day, and I got very dumb. This was fun.
Bundle of Holding’s having a week of Cthulhu Confidential as their current offer, which I highlight as it’s one of these unusual things – a 1 on 1 RPG, with a bunch of scenarios, based on the Gumshoe system (i.e. it’s about detective and puzzling). In lockdown times, I suspect this may be an especially good time for this.
Comic Book Case is doing a Quarantine Reading list, getting pros to contribute capsule reviews. I hammered out a couple of paragraphs on the divine Blue Monday: Absolute Beginners.
I got quoted in the Guardian article about the effect of Coronavirus upon the comic industry, where I basically say Dunno.
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How are you? This week I simultaneously hit the “You know, I actually like the quietness of life now, when we come out of this, I may simplify” stage while also actively having to resist the urge to crawl beneath my desk as everything is so pointless.
But it’s okay. Last week I devoted to just polishing work which needed polishing, which led to three scripts being handed in, and genuinely dealing with a lot of other things I had backed up. This included the article for PxP, and a bunch of other stuff – I’ve done a draft of DIE RPG 1.2 for release, which will likely be before the next Newsletter. It’s only small tweaks, but they change the play experience significantly. I’ll write more when it’s done.
However, having fed artists on these three projects I was left entirely open this week. I could write whatever I want to write. Clearly, this is an entirely false statement. If I’m writing for three artists, in a months time I’m going to need to feed all three again, so what I likely should be doing is just doing the next one for each of those three. But no. I’ve earned a week, so I’m going to use it for something else – in this case, writing DIE 14 and 15 simultaneously. They’re so entwined, I realised it’d be better to do one huge Scrivener document so I could move scenes between the two as bits of the structure suggests itself.
It is also all huge emotional beats which (and this is the irony of writing) which means it’s actually easy to approach. Everything is dramatic. All I have to do is write it, let those characters respond and glides into existence like a warship coming out of the fog. I am also aware that doing this rapidly leads to the question of “so… how are you going to do the fourth arc of this, hmm?”
I’ll worry about that eventually. For me, keeping my head down and keeping typing is basically my only tactic.
Now I’m going to try and write a quick one pager for a charity anthology (I have an idea. It involves a truly awful pun) and then do some preparation for an interview I’m doing at 6pm. As in, I’m interviewing someone. It’s a friend, so it shouldn’t be tricky, but there’s still a little prep I want to do.
Hope you’re doing as well as you can be right now. If you need to go and hide beneath your desk, feel free. Don’t hide between mine, as it’s so dusty down there your allergies will go berserk.
Kieron Gillen
London.
29.4.2020