265: You won't like her when she's hangry
Hullo.
One More Time
Original
Omnomnom
Books
Perfect Console
Byyyyeeee!!!
So, yeah, I'm doing it again for reasons, mainly as (just like Orange Juice who are just like the Four Tops) I can't help ourselves. The full list of DJs should be excellent, and all will bring bangers. You will have a fun time.
Details of the party are here. Short of it, is if you have a ticket you can come, it's at the Majestic Hotel and they urge folks to buy drinks in the party area rather than the main bar due to reasons.
Thought Bubble is actually lining up to be a busier one than usual for me – as well as this, I've got three panels I'm on, one of them I'm running and is a live DIE game. A very weird DIE game. Yes, I know, what else is new?
More details later when the full schedule drops. You can get your tickets for the festival here. 11th-12th of November.
Sktchd has just published a big Original Comics feature, about the difficulties and tactics to launching a new book right now. He interviewed a whole bunch of folks for it, and it's a rich overview of where we all are. It's definitely worth reading if you're a Sktchd supporter, and if you're not, you should consider becoming one.
Here's the answers I sent, if you want a portrait of where my head is going back into creator owned stories.
CREATOR ORIGINATED COMICS IN 2023
From your perspective, how does the environment for telling original, non-licensed stories feel right now?
In short: it seems tough. There’s the weird irony that it’s easier to tell stories than ever before, but harder to really hit.
Does the current environment seem different than it has in the past?
The environment is always different. Every time I’ve gone to do original work, the field has been different. Partially because I’m different, but mainly because the market is. DIE launched when things were relatively down. WicDiv launched when it was up. Phonogram launched in a period where Image doing a book like Phonogram was still seen as unusual, and we had to get past that prejudice. You’re always going to think “Okay – how are things? How can I use that?”
But it’s certainly different from those couple of years back when things were up – though being such a huge collector-alt-cover period means it’s more difficult to see the actual footfall of readers. Money is obviously great, and all love to collectors, but when trying to judge what’s really going on, it makes it trickier.
There’s a lot of turnover and turmoil on the publisher side these days, to say nothing of the broad range of deals available to creators. With that in mind, how crucial is it to be vigilant in figuring out the right place for your project? Is that more important than ever, or has that part always been a key consideration so little has changed?
It’s always been there. Know what the deal is, and make your peace with it, better or worse.
My early work for Avatar (Uber, Mercury Heat) was all work for hire. Their page rate was pretty good for an indie, I was developing a pre-existing core idea. They weren’t stories I’d have written if I hadn’t been hired to do so, and I wanted a place to write, improve my craft and have artists that I wouldn’t worry about starving to death. I still feel okay about those deals. It was the right choice for me then.
So, it’s always there. And my reasoning there speaks to a larger thing - the thing about making original stories is “How can we pay the team for this?” That’s the first problem to think about (as in, you need money to make a book, so all other problems are downstream from that. If the book wouldn’t have existed without the sub-ideal deal, you’re choosing between “book existing” and “not.” Of course, it’s sometimes better to choose “not.”)
Now, with even more options, it’s even harder. There’s upsides and downsides to everything, and you weigh it. And a lot of them have a monkey paw aspect.
Take those Substack grants. “Have this free money and do something as a newsletter”, but it meant that your most excited fans (i.e. those who back the substack) will not be pushing it in the general conversation when it’s available in to everyone else. None of those books seem to have become a big part of the comics chat – even something as amazing as Public Domain, with its Eisner success, doesn’t seem to be doing Sex Criminal numbers.
However, it’s already been paid for, right? It’s not as if Chip or anyone else is losing money.
And in a period where there doesn’t seem to be a major hit, maybe that is the smart choice? At least on an individual making-rent level for a creator. Maybe the publishers which just pay a rate (some a very high rate) for original stories done WFH style is a pay off worth doing? Or a balance between them – this story I’m fine with giving away a slice (or all) of to a publisher, but this one has to be mine.
Tricksy, right?
But what all the creators do as an individual impacts the market, in terms of what is getting people excited about and going into shops. One of the bigger lessons of WicDiv was how infinitely easier it was to sell a book when it was already a hit, and a market with hits generates more hits.
And there’s the movement of the larger publishers. If they’re doing well, everyone is normally doing well.
You’re aware that the smartest decisions you make may not matter one jot. I often think of that panel at the end of Marvel Boy – where Doctor Midas is dropped in the Dread Dimension, and turns towards an army of Mindless Ones coming at him, and he says “How can I turn this to my advantage?” The answer is: he can’t. He’s fucked.
Comics can sometimes be an army of Mindless ones coming at you.
What are the biggest challenges for creators in this space right now from your perspective?
See next question.
There are a lot of comics right now, a lot of which are original ideas. How much of the challenge is trying to stand out amongst the rest?
You’ve described the problem in the question. It’s just that there’s more stuff out there. In which case, how do you differentiate? Especially when a lot of the traditional ways to get your message out have collapsed – social media, comics journalism, etc.
We’re in the business of selling stories – but the business of selling stories itself is selling a story. When readers know the story they’re involved in, they buy in. The Image wave of 2013-2014 was a story – image is hot, creators are heading away from the big two to drop their sexy new books, etc. People could understand it, and the success of each fed into the next.
This works on the individual level too. Look at James’ work in the last few years – he’s very successful sold a story about his work, and the success of each has fed into the next.
The problem is the most basic story for big Original book is now over-saturated. “Hey – here’s a creator you love doing their own thing”. That’s a great story! But now there’s more venues to do it (plus more publishers fighting for attention and less ways to get attention) it may not be enough to differentiate yourself, or make people aware of it.
Like, I know I’ve got a young kid which means I’m especially out the conversation, but I’m aware that I don’t know what some of my friends’ present creator owned book is. That’s not good.
When listening to your last podcast with Patrick Brower, I just tore up my plans l had for my work post-Marvel. I was thinking of just landing hard and doing 4 books simultaneously, in a line. An imprint. A hammer blow of new stuff, a big, brassy move.
Now, that’s fun, and it still appeals to some degree, but hearing Patrick talk about what it was like on the ground, I knew that would just autocanniblise. That’s a good story, but likely too big a story for retailers to buy into entirely.
After Patrick’s talk, I’ve decided to focus. One book, all my efforts in making it as good as we can, and then reaching people to tell about it – and hope that both the narrative about the book and inside the book is compelling enough to bring people along.
I jokingly said to my wife – maybe if one tried, they could actually be the last great sequential original story told in the American pamphlet format. You know – like how the Clash after the punk years sold themselves as the last rock and roll band? Of course, the irony there that a genuinely great Clash-sized hit would rejuvenate the format. A new Saga would begat more Sagas.
I’m too old to style out that kind of posture but you know what I mean?
The solicits for Marvel in December have gone live. Here's Mark's cover for Immortal X-men 18.
Coo. You won't like her when she's hangry.
Simon Parkin's 'My Perfect Console podcast is a games-you-loved-as-autobiography format, where one takes five games for their hypothetical perfect console. Desert Island Disks (and cartridges and whatever else). Simon is always great (I've plugged his nonfiction books before, which I've loved) and is a great host, and has talked to a bunch of really interesting folks.
I actually listened back to this, as I'd forgot what I'd said, and rather than a quick check, I had it playing and was struck by exactly what a weird bunch of material I've approached here. Some of it is autobio stuff you'd have heard before, but a lot is specific bits and bobs that I haven't really talked about, in terms of my journey towards art as a pre-teen and teenager, and my origin story as a writer. Plus what it was like to be a working games journo entering the field at the end of the 1990s Money And Cocaine era of the field. The weird obsessive that I was (and still am) really comes through. If you've any interest in this side of me, this seems really worth your time. It's also on Spotify, and probably elsewhere, but I'm not looking any more, as I am very lazy.
As I'll discuss in the outro, I've created more space for reading – both for work and pleasure. I'm trying to lob capsule reviews of things on my Blue Sky account as they occur. Here's some of them, remixed, and with more stuff lobbed in.
I read PARASOCIAL last night and loved it. Misery in the social media age is the obv reference, but it's smarter in its refusal to put creatives on a pedestal and dwells on our performances and the way we fail to see one another. It's also got a playful, petrifying approach to the medium, with a real understanding of the impressionistic effect of cartooning line, expert integrating of media and a whole lot more I'm resisting screengrabbing as you want to see this yourself. (If you liked WicDiv, you should be all over this) A single graphic novel, out out Oct 10th, talk to your retailer.
I've also joined a reading group for new comic number ones with friends, which has been fun. The best of them was Ram V and Filipe Andrade's RARE FLAVOURS #1 which is just delicious. It really does seem that all I want to consume now is cooking stuff, and this creates its own taste by blending cooking manga with supernatural horror. It's a recipe book as an eulogy for the recently murdered.
I also finally got around to reading the collected WONDER WOMAN: HISTORIA. I'd read the first issue when it came out, but only caught up with the rest here, and it's an astounding body of work. All artists do amazing things, but there's something fascinating in what Phil brings to the page in the first chapter – actually numinous in its intensity. There's pages which I'm actively afraid of, as if it's a portal to a platonic real of greater reality and I would crumble if I stepped any closer. There's lots of books about gods in the comic world, but few which manage to feel like the divine.
I grabbed that in my trip to Forbidden Planet, along with a handful of recent manga. I've completely fell of recent Manga, which prompted me to tweet asking for recs of modern stuff on BlueSky, which has a bunch of things I'll be working my way through and may be worth nosing for you too.. I'm mainly including it here so I can easily find it when I need to buy something else.
-
The WGA deal-in-principle is now public, the strike is over and (to my eyes) things are looking good there. Gerry has been deeply involved in this, and writes about it – and especially AI – in his newsletter
-
Ed Zitron writes extensively about the collapse of NFT value “The NFT hype was a long con on customers and the media at large — a classic scam where companies built the appearance of value without ever actually generating any. And it worked, enriching already-wealthy people like Marc Andreessen and Alexis Ohanian and conning retail investors for profit.”
-
Eric Garneau writes about his experience of DIE, describing it as the RPG the 1980s was afraid of. “No matter the specific scenario you play, you’re going to be drawing on your own experiences of failure, inadequacy, and anxiety as you embody your Persona. DIE is a game about people who had ambitions that reality didn’t embrace. I don’t think I know a single person who couldn’t immediately construct this kind of scenario from their real life.”
-
I've genuinely lost track which DIE actual plays I've plugged here, which says a lot about how it's been embraced by the actual play community which is great to see. Role To Cast is well into theirs, which you can listen to here. I just started listening to the latest episode, which features a “What's the most dangerous kiss you've ever had?” which is some A+ DIE GMing. Dead Ghost Productions is about to start theirs – Replay – which has a trailer here, and seems a great concept – radio show, getting back together, as meta is what we're here for. If you want to stay up to date, the DIE discord has a channel entirely about Actual Plays and another devoted to people talking about their games. If you're interested in seeing folk are running DIE, they await you.
-
It's the 10 year anniversary of Sex Criminals Number 1 and Chip has a little think about it. I look forward to 2043 for the XXX anniversary of Sex Criminals, by which point we will all be dust.
I've had a bit of a shake-up to my schedule. I had a particularly bad day in terms of productivity, and then looked back and realised that while I'm absolutely on top of all my work, that's not good enough – especially with going back to Creator Owned means I have a lot more reading (as well as the last bit of serious research for the end of my X-run). I'm aware that I'm just wasting too much time, and so I'm cracking down on opportunities to do so, while creating freedom to do other things. I'm going to explicitly give myself permission to do anything else after I've finished my morning writing, for most the afternoon, as long as it doesn't involve sitting on a PC (and so inevitably, refreshing the internet).
My brain is bad at many things, but it's pretty good with hard rules for schedule, so this is working, at least for now – and “for now” is all that matters. It works until it doesn't. That's life.
It has led to a lot more reading of comics both for work (I've read through the entire history of one of my cast in Immortal, for example) and not for work (see above – though some of that is just explicitly trying to get to bed slightly earlier and reading something). The X-research stuff is for what I'm plotting (I'm still in the process of landing my X-stuff), but will hopefully segue into what I need for TPF. I've even managed to do some household work I've been meaning to do for ages, just because it's not a computer.
That's the big thing this week, and I'm really hoping it sticks. I'm happiest when I'm productive, and if this makes me happier, it makes me significantly more bearable.
In terms of other stuff, the work this week was starting work on a new non-comics project. It's early days, and I'm still feeling out the format (and what the people I'm working for want) but it's slick enough. We've really worked on the synopsis, so in some ways, it's just an editing job on that. There's also some interesting RPG stuff in the mix – one thing which is way too early to chat about, but is unusual enough to be interesting, and perhaps will involve me finally getting to do more prose in public. Also, having handed in the DIE quickstart adventure, I need to move onto my adventure for the second scenarios book – LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD, a 2 player DIE game about a failing relationship told via the medium of wargames. There probably will be orcs in it, but the orcs will be a metaphor for who didn't do the dishes.
The WGA strike seems really good news, and the week will involve slowly prodding things which went into hibernation and seeing where they are now. The weird thing is that the news the strike was over actually created a small spike of anxiety – now there's something else I have to deal with. I suspect that's one of the things which prompted me reworking my schedule. That said, I'm turning 48 on Saturday (i.e. officially nearly 50) which it's probably just the geriatric equivalent of spring cleaning.
Oh – one last thing.
If you ever enjoy a newsletter and think the content is worth more eyes, do consider forwarding it or spreading the word about it. As I'm not on Substack, it means I lack all the recommendation systems which are built in there, which lead to a lot of sign ups. My retired substack has almost identical subscriber numbers as this list. As in, the passive growth from just being on Substack is equal to the efforts of someone actually generating a bunch of things to read on a mailing list. That's pretty depressing, right? As the systems of the last 10 year collapse, word of mouth is increasingly important to everyone. I'd certainly appreciate it.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
27.9.2023