268: the enigmatic “L”
Hullo.
Forever changes
Blanket Fort Bubbles
The Toilet is Majestic
Not Null Points
Headmusik
The biggest band of all time is a pun
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
Announced last week was X-men Forever, a four issue mini to tie into Rise of the Powers of X. While it's always designed as a jumping on point, this is basically what I did with the Death to the Eternals mini alongside AXE. If you like Immortal X-men, this is where it continues. Here's what I said in the press release...
“X-MEN FOREVER is Luca and myself doing a coda to Immortal X-Men, a requiem for the Krakoan age and generally setting fire to all time and space,” Gillen explained. “It’s the manipulative hand in the steel glove that is Rise of the Powers of X. By the time it drops, you’ll be wondering what on earth is going on with certain characters, and X-MEN FOREVER will give you all the answers.”
One big change - Luca replaces Lucas, which makes me think that we're going to lose Luca by next issue, replacing them with Luc, and then issue 3 is Lu and finally the enigmatic “L”. Luca is great. If you don't know his work, go check out Childen of the Vault where he and Deniz Camp are basically tearing everything to pieces. It's just a swaggering piece of work by both creators, and Luca hasn't blinked at the impossible tasks I'm setting him in X-Men Forever.
It's out in March – so circa issue 3 of Powers of X. That's unusual, for a four issue mini tying in to a 5 issue series. In some ways it actually functions a little like those three additional specials did in AXE – they're released in an intense part of the timeline, digging deeper.
Baring utter disaster, I'm at Tbubz this weekend.
I'm at I2-A in the Bubbleboy hall. Which is here...
As you see below, I'm away from my table a bunch, but my comrades at Rowan Rook & Decard will be there and happy to sell you stuff when I'm not about. Here's my provisional schedule, though I'll update on the table if anything changes. C will hopefully be signing too, so come along for all your Golden Rage energies. And Lauren and I think Sophie too? I am very organised.
SATURDAY
10:00 – 12:00 - Signing at the table
12:45 - 13:45 - Fantastical Realms: Images, Influences and Inspiration (Dead Northern Stage, The Fourth Hall)
Isabelle Greenberg and myself talking with the curators of the British Library's new Fantasy exhibition about the creation of imagery and fantasy worlds.
14:00-15:00 - Signing at the table
16:00-17:00 - Signing at the table
20:00-00:00 - The Thought Bubble Afterparty, the Majestic Hotel
Al Ewing, Sarah Gordon, Jules Scheele, Jazzlyn Stone and myself, on the decks, one more time.
SUNDAY
10:00 – 12:00 – Signing at Table
12:15-13:15 - Games, comics, games, comics, games, comics, crisps! (Workshop, Queens Suite)
Workshop with Sara Kenny and Mink ette about making games about comics.
14:00-15:30 - DIE RPG: PANEL BLEED (Dead Northern Stage, The Fourth Hall)
I'm running a short live game of DIE. Currently we have Al Ewing, Becky Cloonan, Ram V and Dan Watters playing. This will be very silly and highly meta and I'm slightly scared.
16:00 – 1700 – Signing at Table
Of course, we're forgetting the most important thing about Thought Bubble. The Majestic Toilet.
And in a running joke that's gone completely out of control, an anthology about the toilet is presently kickstartering.
I'm writing the crypt-keeper-esque framing story, which I had huge fun doing – almost as much fun as I have leading people to the toilets in real life. There's a bunch of great creators in here, both established and up and coming, and for all the silliness of its formation, it's going to be a real anthology of horror stories that I can't wait to read.
Here's the ever-great Liana Kangas' pin-up to give a vibe.
[Go back it and spread the word. I'm actively upset that this hasn't funded already](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chrismole/secrets-of-the-majestic-anthology]. Come on, comics. Don't make me sad.
PJ Holden is getting friends to write a one page comic for him, and then publishing them. They're called Null Space and it's great to see him play. The above is a fragment from Chrissy's one, which is a great synthesis between PJ's 2000AD implied worldbuilding and Chrissy's poetry-comics mode.
Over on blue sky I've been doing more plugs of things I've been reading, which I will be expanding here, probably next time (As this one is already a bit long). However, as it's out today, I wanted to get a quick plug for Rob Williams/Pyr Parr's PETROL HEAD #1 which is lots of fun. Real pop 2000AD energy, in a ABC Warriors meets Deathrace 2000 way. Obsolete robot ex-racing star in a rigged system (in every way) is dragged into a race for the future. Fundamentally: why bladerun when you can bladedriveafuckingcar?
I wrote all this before the new Beatles single dropped. Moreso: I wrote all this before I even realised there was a Beatles single coming out. This says a lot.
The Beatles are a funny band, for me. I've never loved them. That'd be like loving oxygen, right? It's always been there, is clearly very important, you suspect you'd have trouble living without it and you really hope to never find out, but you don't think about it that much.
They were a favourite band of my Parents – my mum preferred the Pre-Sergeant Pepper's stuff, and I honestly don't know what my Dad preferred. One of my first memories is Lennon's death, which I didn't understand at all, except mum and dad seemed very sad for a reason I couldn't understand. However, despite that, it's not a band they played a lot around the house. The music I grew up on was primarily soul, primarily Stax and Motown.
But, even so, they were the Beatles. Growing up when I did, they were there. You couldn't escape them. You sang them in school, the secular hymns of our parents.
Phonogram had a whole Beatles plot I wanted to do, which I never got around to. Fundamentally, it was about Kohl's inability to engage with the Beatles. They're so canonised they're fossilised for him. They're dead, magically speaking, because they've been frozen. Like all Phonogram, it's all subjective magic systems. It's not saying you can't do magic with the Beatles – it's that Kohl can't. You suspect Penny would have no trouble doing magic with Twist And Shout. Kohl's problem is he thinks too much. He's no longer Lloyd, but he once was. Once a Lloyd, you never quite stop being Lloyd.
(It was only way later I realised that this idea is in conversation with the Invisibles, specifically Morrison and Yeowell's first issue, where King Mob summons Lennon as a god. The Invisibles is one of the obvious big influences on Phonogram and later WicDiv (our first panel quotes its first panel) but if I look at it honestly, I suspect all the big influences on us are from that first issue. As if I'd read I read it, and then stopped, saying “That'll do me.”)
Early on in WicDiv, I was flirting with returning to the idea – I kind of wanted WicDiv to partially be a reckoning with the Beatles – specifically the idea of “Your parents music”. The Beatles haunt those early issues – the first issue most of all, with multiple Beatles quotes, and later with Lucifer's parents terrible choice of name for her. It's an element that was swiftly abandoned. I discovered pretty quickly that WicDiv wasn't really about that – but there's a handful of Beatles tracks on the playlist which speak to that urge. I saw her standing there, which provides the quotes in the first issue – the first track from the first album, their opening into the idea of canon, and ours echoing it. Ahistorical, of course – albums weren't a big deal until people like the Beatles made them one. Eleanor Rigby is on, for obvious reasons – Lucifer's name, the mood and so on. We Can Work It Out was added, on something that feels both like a whim and a compulsion. A lot of WicDiv's playlist was added like that – a sort of jotter list of pop I loved which I racked my brains working out a way to justify including. “This is why I fell in love (and hate) with pop music, so I want a record of it”. We Can Work It Out came on the radio and just jumped out, and I realised I wanted to add it, but it really didn't seem very WicDiv. And then McCartney is barged out the way and Lennon comes in with the rejoinder of “Life is very short/And there's no time, for fussing or fighting, my friend”, and it's added as quick as anything that ever arrived in that cursed document.
I've come back to the Beatles more recently, primarily due to Hickey's History Of Rock Music in 500 songs moving through them – the last episode I hit with them was focused on Ticket To Ride, which continued unlocking a lot of interesting stuff for me. Seeing them in the context, and telling their story slowly and methodically, and me delving in around it on my own has made them come alive – the records not just as artefacts, or bits of canon, but seeing them working creatives, total music obsessives, trying to carve the air into pleasing shapes, inspired by others as much as they inspired.
And it's put me right to the period too. Not Just the Beatles, but the idea of being alive then. That their first single and the Beach Boys' first UK single came out on the same day is an easy Phonogram story to write... and doubly so when it's the week before the Cuban Fucking Missle Crisis. I imagine a 1960s-Lloyd walking around with his head in the clouds about this music while the rest of the world thinks of nuclear mushroom ones.
So, I come back to the Beatles, and only when writing this do I realise I'm basically doing to them what I did to Tolkien in the process of researching DIE. I took someone who I had significant critical animosity towards despite the fundamental influence of their work on me, and in the process of seeing them as people responding to the place life takes them, re-imagine them. I forgive them for their part in making me.
(It's not true of all creators in the podcast. There's some obvious real absolute monsters, but the people who are sticking with me are ones who are just total twonks.)
I think all of this, and as I'm working on the first issue of TPF (the new creator owned thing), and wondering how it'll play in. It isn't a book like DIE or Phonogram or WicDiv, in so far it's not about pop culture. But as I was planning it and looking at the (large) historical period it covers, I found more pop culture creeping in. As I said above – imagine listening to this new record by a Liverpool band while not sure the world will still be there when the needle reaches the center. The people who talk about history are those who find ways to make it live in our mind, and if I'm writing something which is quasi-historical, I want it to be more than what people are wearing. Don't just show their shoes – put people in them.
Heh. Yesterday is now playing. I believe in Yesterday, indeed, and the job is to make one believe in it.
Don't worry – still wince at Yesterday. I haven't gone completely soft.
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Talking about The Beatles new one, here's Andrew Hickeys' take on it, which gives a lot of useful ways to approach it – both the ethics, the technicalities and some things which absolutely break my heart.
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Tilly Bridges writes about queerphobia in apparent allies and the downfall of A League Of Their Own.
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Ben Davis writes about what happened when he wrote a relative positive review of Devon Rodriguez's debut show, and then the creator sicced his fans on him. Lots of insight on parasociality, the nature of criticism and a whole lot more. It reminded of the story about Kevin Rowlands distraughtly begging a critic to tell then what they needed to do to turn the 9/10 for Don't Stand Me Down into a 10.
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I love when Gerry does photography stuff. Here's him talking about Arthur Tress' work, which is beautiful, and his shots of NYCC almost made me wish I was there and got covid along with everyone else. Almost.
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Andrew Farago's orbituary of Keith Giffen over at TCJ is very well done.
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Some of the finer Ex-Kotaku writers launch their own site, Aftermath which they talk about here. This should be really good, I think. Subscription stuff is really the only way to go now, I fear. You get what you pay for.
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The anniversary edition of X-men Monday, over at AIPT with everyone downloading a bunch of thoughts about Krakoa. Also, jokes. “I think the biggest surprise was probably Forearm. I knew Wiz Kid would go over, I knew Peeper would go over, I knew pretty much any X-character had a deeply intense fanbase — but I wasn’t prepared for the reaction to Valerio Schiti putting a beard on Forearm. Suddenly, out of nowhere, everyone wants his fifth arm. Incredible scenes.” Al Ewing!
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The always good Cannibal Halfing write a review (except not a review) of DIE RPG.
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Aditya on The Bear, taking apart what it does. I suspect this is my show of the year, and I'm also aware that it's the one which a whole bunch of comic folks will be picking apart for Ways To Do Things. One directorial thing I noted is that it does this thing where it films everyone really close up – like, you're a lover close, to everyone, and that has some interesting psychological effects. Like, I'm love with the whole cast, for one. Also, I was very proud when I realised that its oft-used Strange Currencies is from REM's Monster, which has a bear on the cover. That has to be deliberate, right?
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Chris McDowall's Mythic Bastionland is kickstarting at the moment. Weird arthurian knight saga, all Excalibur and Pendragon. The beta's in the link if you want to nose. The aging mechanic is so elegantly beautiful that I had to rant at Chris embarrassingly in the pub when I met him.
It's been a few weeks and it's been a lot. The house remains sick, no-one's sleeping and even I've caught a dose of a cold. Work has been done, but it's not been what I wanted. Still: decks are being cleared. I managed to write all the DIE RPG commitments for the rest of the year – the thing which nearly broke me was writing the DIE Quickstart. I'd written one (another task that took a long time) and we shelved it as it just wasn't right – I'm going to use it as the basis of a much larger scenario later. So I started again, simpler, and it was just wasn't working at all.
DIE-scenarios are mainly born of the persona questions being turned into encounters. As in, you take this fact you got earlier and plug it into this encounter and it creates something meaningful. The problem was is that the encounters were just bullshit, and when that's true in DIE, that normally means the questions are bullshit. The process became basically going back, tweaking the questions, and then trying to write encounters again – with the real limiting factor of the word-count for a quickstart, meaning the questions for all persona have to be connected thematically or it won't fit in. All in all, it took what can only be described as an uneconomical amount of time to write.
And then I wrote the 36 player game of DIE we're running at Dragonmeet in a day, because that (weirdly) was just a much simpler job.
Anyway – Grant has nosed at most of these and think they're fine. Phew. It's a real relief, because if the quickstart was just crap, I suspect my schedule would be in trouble. I still need to finish off the DIE scenario I'm running at Thought Bubble, but I could run it off notes and be fine. It's very silly.
(You'll note Grant is back to editing stuff now – Zach has moved to their own Soulmuppet full time, so I'm integrating directly with the Grant complex. Thanks for all the work, Zach, and I'm sorry. They're also kickstarting an orbital blues expansion right now, so go nose if sad space cowboys are your thing.)
On comic stuff, I just went through the lettering proof for the last issue of Immortal X-men, which completes it. Well “complete”. As I said at the start, X-men Forever is the story's new home, but it still feels like a conclusion. It's dense (like most of this arc) but I think it holds together, and am looking forward to it getting to you. I've also been doing the final bits of plotting – we have to have Mark at work on the covers for this, which means the big pile of “stuff that is happening” is actually been arranged into issues.
If you're keeping count, I've got 3 issues of Forever to write, and 2 issues of Rise of the Powers of X. So... 5 issues of Marvel work on series, plus some more pages on (er) something else. Let's say 7 issues of stuff, in terms of page count.
All this is actually about clearing the decks so I can concentrate on the new thing, TPF. The artist and I are bouncing back and forth sketches and thoughts on the sketches (him sketch, me notes – the alternative is horrific). Abstractly this week was just concentrating on that, but I'm more nudging up against it and trying to do proper plotting for the opening twelve issues (it's the sort of book where sequencing is important). In reality, I think I'll write my first actual page son Friday, when I'm travelling up to Thought Bubble.
I've mentioned my ritual nonsense about projects before – the big one is sending an artist a new script at Midnight of the new year.
Here's a small one – sometimes I break ground on a new project on the way up to Tbubz. For example, the opening of Journey into Mystery was written on the train up to Leeds, with that whole bit of Gaiman homage with the ravens. As such, it'd be in good company if I actually start properly then.
On the other hand,s I have so much notes written, it's entirely possible I'll pull together the whole of issue 1 on a whim on Thursday.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
8.11.2023