276: tempting, but ahistorical
Hullo.
Emerald
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Glass mountains
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Bye
I mentioned last time that I'll be at Emerald City Comic Con at the end of the month (Feb 29th-March 3rd), my only US comics on in my whole second stay in the Marvel Universe. That still feels odd. It will be good to see folks.
I'm tabling at A-10 (with comrade Caspar Wingaard) and will be signing stuff. My usual rules is 5 books, but you can always requeue, but I'll see on the day what it's like (and likely put up better guidelines in my pre-con newsletter). I'm not selling any stuff at the con, so bring whatever you wish. I'll likely work out my signing times for the newsletter before ECCC, but at the least, they'll be on the tables.
I'm doings several Panels!
Spotlight on Kieron Gillen
Fri, Mar 1, 2024 • 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
Location: Summit • Room 431• Comics
This is my big panel, where I basically plan to talk about whatever the audience wants to hear. I also have things to tell you about. Come, and be excited.This is Your Brain on Comics with Chip Zdarsky
Fri, Mar 1, 2024 • 6:45 PM - 7:30 PM
Location: Summit • Room 432 • Pro Programming
I'm talking to Chip about everything. I suspect topics will mainly be about how we're just much less attractive than our artists.
I also said I'd do the Image panel, but it's up against Chip's panel, so it seems I won't be. Man, that's a shame.
This was also released since last time on Drivethru. Apocalypse Keys: Doomsday Delights is the collection of stretch goals that went alongside The Apocalypse Keys kickstarter, to which I contributed the adventure.
I love Rae's work generally and Apocalypse Keys specifically, so it was great to be asked. Design wise, Apocalypse Keys is a maximilist hymn to everything Rae seems to have loved in PBTA design with a bunch of his own additions. Thematically, this is the Monsters-doomed-to-fight-for-a-world-and-risk-losing-themselves of things like Hellboy. It's really neat. When playtesting my adventure (I actually got to play!) I ran a character whose core idea I loved so much that I'm taking him/her and having them cameo in TPF.
Anyway – the adventure is The Company Of Gentry, and takes the form of all Apocalypse Keys mysteries. They're deconstructed adventures, which give a structure, NPCs, clues, high concepts and all the rest... but they're assembled at the table, depending on the choices of the player and the demands of the rules. Inspired by the Brindlewood Bay games, the mysteries solution is entirely generated from the players theorising in a way which integrates the clues, and so creates the final truth.
Most the pre-existing adventures come from people writing about their own cultural background, which made me want to do something set in and about the UK. The core concept is something which you can easily imagine as an arc in Once & Future....
Despite me really trying to write to the format, I ended up subconsciously bringing more of Mass Effect 2 (perhaps it being an influence of another of Rae's games, Once More Into the Void). So it's even more freeform than most of the existing adventures, with five distinct starting points.
It also features the British Rail system.
Anyway, there's lots of lovely art too! Here it is if you already have Apocalypse Keys, and here's Apocalypse Keys itself if you want to jump aboard.
I haven't had any time for any asks recently, but this one popped up and I found myself compelled...
Q: I have to know - as a disco elysium fan who didn't do disco, what would you say is essential disco listening for me?
I’m going to answer a connected but completely different question, and then maybe then loop back to you. I’m just looking for an excuse to ramble, and do the writer equivalent of a warm-up sketch (i.e. waste time).
My apologies.
If you wake up and decide that you want to get into a whole genre of music, there’s basically two tactics.
(There’s also the “Why would anyone care to get into something they don’t care about”, which is one of the few things I have a “There’s two sorts of people…” response to - those who when presented by something unknown either think “why should I know about that?” or “why don’t I know about that?” I’m the latter, and it’s served me well.)
The first tactic is simple.
Jump on a genre with Best Of in the title and follow your pleasure response. Here’s a Spotify one. What interests you? What excited you? What makes you laugh? Probably explore more of that. If not, indulge widely, and see what sticks. At a glance, Disco playlists seem to have the problem of most playlists, in that strictly not everything on it is disco per se. For example, Dancing Queen strictly speaking isn’t a disco song - but it’s a song about disco, in every way. But if anything has found its way on a playlist, it’s found its way on for a reason.
In your case, you’re interested in what Disco resonates with Disco Elysium. Which I’ve bought for C, but not played, but I’m aware of in a “if I was still a games journalist, this is clearly one I would write a lot about.” I spent years writing about Planescape Torment, and I know a spiritual successor when I see one.
This makes me think the area you want is basically the classier end - the big bleak emotions, the chilliness, the control, lonely on a dancefloor, lonely everywhere, oh-so-much cocaine, and - to steal Paul Lester’s line - glass mountains on fire.
Which leads back to the second way of getting into a genre of music - which is to hit a major artist, and hit them hard.
When asked about “how shall I get into a band” my advice is actually the opposite of what I’m about to give. If you just want to get into a band, get Best Of, see what tracks you like, then go to the albums they’re from. But if you’re trying to get into a whole genre of music, that’s a more serious endeavour, and may reward the opposite approach.
Basically pick a key album from a key band, and get into it, and grow from there. Read about the band - you don’t need much, but a little helps. Learn how to listen to what their tracks do. And then you use that band as the single point of knowledge you have to orientate yourself to everything else you listen afterwards.
There’s a huge danger to this - basically, no-one is more ignorant than someone with a little knowledge. You have to be aware that you are the person who knows a bit about Boss Baby, and using that to get into things other than Boss Baby.
The strength is that it’s a more holistic, lived in knowledge than just skimming the surface. You understand the music better as an artifact of their times, made by people, responding to their specific situation - which adds different flavours to your appreciation of it. Sure, your own response and how it finds a place in your life is always the thing which over-rules anything else - but the more you can listen for, the more you can hear, the more you can get from a work of art.
Anyway - I’m telling you to go and listen to Risque by Chic.
Chic are basically fucking awesome. If you don’t know Disco at all, the opening Good Times chilly ironic take on American late-seventies culture is a great and (I suspect) Disco Elysium relevant intro. You’ll know it as a sample, if nothing else, and the eight minutes version that opens Risque is a great way to think about it as both music for dancing (it is endless) and music for listening (it is boundless).
I got Risque as Paul Lester went to bat for it so hard in the Unknown Pleasures book the Maker stuck on the cover in 1995 (it was covering 20 albums that had fell out of the critical conversation, and it absolutely changed the dirction of my listening in the period). Here’s Lester writing about Risque more recently for a taste, as the original piece doesn’t appear to be online. I just read it in my copy, and it’s a burst of love, describing it Disco as music about love - never sex, only love, and mainly love that is denied. That seems solid, at least for the best of chic.
Risque is the Chic album that Lloyd from Phonogram would have been listening to, certainly. I know I did.
(Plus At Last I Am Free from C'est Chic, obv)
There’s a lot of Chic to listen to - their own work, especially in the period, and all their productions. Their work with Sister Sledge is of particular import - Lost In Music was one of the working title for Phonogram, and you can see and hear why. They’re also the Disco band whose influence is perhaps most obvious in other bands. Everyone liked Chic. No Chic, no Orange Juice, no Orange Juice, no Smiths, etc.
Sister Sledge was the first live band I was at. My mum went to see them when she was eight and a half months pregnant. The temptation to say I’d have heard Lost in Music then in utero is tempting, but ahistorical - that's well before their work with Chic.
Anyway - get into Chic. It’ll make your life better - and when your life isn’t better, it’s a superior context to lose yourself.
However, to go back to your question, as a Disco Elysium fan, I’m not sure it’s actually THIS Disco you’re looking for.
How about Disco Inferno?
Not Disco at all, but most like itself than anything else, which sounds like what I understand about Disco Elysium. right?
(DI Goes Pop is the starting place)
Over on Blueskies, I've taken to doing single skeet capsule thoughts on whatever I've read – mainly comics, but not always. I'm making an effort to hit a selection of the PDFs I have around, and comics lying around in piles. As such, it's pretty random. I try to stick to the one-skeet length, but occasionally put a little more in a re-skeet.
(Blue Skies is open now, so if you are in the mood for low level yabber, you can jump on.)
Anyway – here's a quick remix of a bunch of the latest ones.
Read the first year of the current FANTASTIC FOUR by North, Coello and others, which is a delight. Tightly wound, mostly done-in-one witty science mysteries with heart and brains. Introduce an idea, play with, explode it, packed full of the joy of just getting away with this, on a monthly basis. As an additional note to this - with North, you'd be expecting it to be funny and humane, and good with the science. The thing you'll be surprised about is how actively creepy it manages to be when the story demands.
Read the first collection of the Mary Safe/Io Black webcomic, DRUGS AND WIRES , which is (to paraphrase a blurb) John Allison does 1990s Cyberpunk slice of life. Some A+ palette flourishes too. I think the collection isn't available, but you can read it all here.
Devoured DEEP CUTS 1-5. Standalone tales of jazz across the 20th century, clearly in love with the subject and wanting to share. Kyle Higgins, Joe Clark and different artist for each story, each finding a story about an artist and their art. Just great. DEEP CUTS #5 may be my fave: Juni Ba does great trippy art, serving up the Bangsian hot mess critic trying to write a piece about Free Jazz he fucking hates. Ridiculous and sublime, it earns its ending and still twists the knife with honesty. These are all stand alone, long issues, so just grab.
THE COMPLETE(D) SAUCER COUNTRY: For my money, the best of the late classic period Vertigo books, finally wrapped up on Zoop after 2 publishers. X-files meets the West Wing is the easy pitch, but (like the best Vertigo) really a device for a team to dig deep into their obsessions. Strong stuff. Apart from the content, I'm also really into the form. I suspect if I were to remake the whole western comics industry to my will, the 20-24-issue-equivalent softcover format would be what I'd want as the main mass-market object. How one gets to that object , of course, is another story.
FAST TIME IN COMIC BOOK EDITING by Shelly Bond, Imogen Mangle and a host of others. It's a dive through the life and work of one of comics' most influential editors and Vertigo's 90s peak - part comic, part magazine, part love letter, part vent, this has the feel of a mix-tape, expertly curated.
Over in the world of novels, A SWORD OF BRONZE AND ASHES by Anna Smith Spark's, which moves between the hearth and the forge poetically. I'll unpoetically paraphrase as "Brunhilde In Witness Protection post-Ragnarok gets hunted down by the horsemen of the apocalypse". Strikingly vivid both in its fantasy and mundanity
Also in prose, I AM THE LAW, Mike Molcher's non-fiction dovetailing history of Judge Dredd and the development of modern policing. Flexible, devastating and carefully developed, it's a Lawgiver of a book. With every day that passes, one can think of Dredd as less of a satire of policing, and more of a description. That inspired to read some Dredd: ORIGINS, a story about the death of democracy, the birth of fascism and the lies that feed into it and how they're buried. Dredd always knows what time it is. Ezquerra/Walker kill and and Wagner is the don. It also prompted to hit up NECROPOLIS by Wagner/Ezquerra, one of the megaepics I've never read. Judge Death rules Mega City 1, even if the Sisters of Death do most of the work. They deserve a promotion. Similarly, I suspect we're over-due big essays on Judge Mcgruder as hairy-chinned icon.
Later, I read the first 5 parts of the current JUDGE DREDD 2000AD story - A Better World, which is taut, pointed and bizarre, like much the best Dredd. It brings a Defund The Police concept to the Meg and makes it sing, and Flint is a trippy-noir marvel. My "One skeet and no more" format doesn't serve this one well. I've described what it does, and enthused a bit, but I want to stress it really does the idea, manages to be character led and idea forward simultaneously and feels like absolutely credible as the incredible world of Dredd can be. Here's an interview on it.
GRAVENEYE: read this at night, the right time to curl up with a gothic(100%) Horror(100%) romance(YMMV) like this. Firmly towards the Hannibal end of the queer pop culture spectrum, Bowles draws up a bloodstorm and Leong's unusual choice of narrator and narration provides the the sepulchral drumbeat.
ALL AGAINST ALL by Paknadel/Winjgaard. Best surmised as Alien with aliens as the humans and Tarzan as the alien, it'd work if it just did the popcorn take. Instead, it's extra: big ideas, grief, body-memory presented in a gloriously lurid teeth and claw. Out now in TPB.
THE HOLLYWOOD SPECIAL: period horror which brings faded hollywood glamour and regrets to a mining town, and conjures some genuinely disturbing images. It mines deep and buries into you. Will make a lovely, nightmarish trade.
HELLBLAZER: DEAD IN AMERICA #1, with the crew back behind the wheel, tearing across the USA, as a corpse. Campbell/Bellaire own the vibe, and Spurrier's Jon is a delight. The whole thing thrums with the active disrespect that Hellblazer excels at. I didn't laugh; I cackled.
MOON MAN #1: I was intrigued by Kid Cudi teaming up with Higgins/Locati, and it IS intriguing. Part of McK/my America Chavez concept was a cosmic-power character with a street-level personality. This explores a similar space, with the extra precision and wonder that a CO book allows.
GEEZER #2 is another kickstarter I backed, which is just lots of fun. As someone who'll happily bore you about my time in Britpop Wars, I'm 100% the target audience, but this has much to love. Potter knows exactly the band life and the egos and ridiculousness of it, and no-one draws 90s pop like Bond.
I'm still playing around on Blue Skies a bit, as it is small, so I can fuck around and do something dumb if I feel like it. This one did well!
@kierongillen.bsky.social on Bluesky
The healthy unhealthy motivation.
And wow, embedding works now. Cripes.
- Rossignol forwarded me this on Brueghel's Landscape With Fall On Icarus, on poet's response to it and how exactly it nails what it is to be human in a world of hell, where miraculous children fall and drown unseen in the seas. To take everything in with the seriousness it deserves would be to drown too. To take nothing in is to annihilate anything which makes you human. We all have to choose where between the two we want to fall.
- Vita compiled this list of resources for those who want to know more about Palestine – the history, the situation, things one can do and everything else. They say they plan to keep it updated, which means it'll be a good one to bookmark or come back to.
- Mark Stewart (aka Amypoodle) of The Mindless Ones died recently, suddenly and shockingly young. Illogical Volume writes about him and his criticism, and the worldview imparted herein. If you've never read any Amypoodle, it's a good place to start too.
- Quinns Shut Up And Sit Down has started his new video channel, Quinns Quest, where he plans to talk about tabletop RPG stuff, in his own style. First up is the Wildsea, which is a game which I haven't given enough attention to, and Quinns explains very much why. Also, jokes.
- Samantha Hancox-Li's piece on Why Movements Fail has been going around my head, coalescing thoughts I've been chewing over for a while. The short of it is: the last decade and change has seen a great number of large mass protest movements, almost none of which have achieved their goals. “This underlies the allure of horizontalism. Horizontalism promises power without accountability, revolution without compromise. Give History a kick and it'll take care of the rest. "I'm not doing anything, it's the impersonal forces of history/the nation/class struggle." You can focus on that feeling you had out on the streets, everyone living and breathing and moving as one joyous whole—without ever having to have the moral courage to articulate what that better world would actually look like or how we might get there.”
- I'm worried about Tom Ewing, as he's only gone and read all of Cerebus, and is reviewing the whole thing. This opening post which posits that there's actually Three Cerebuses is really strong. Me? I never went past Jaka's Tale.
I just finished the first draft of X-Men Forever 4, and only a few minutes later did I realise that “Oh – you just finished Immortal X-men”. I can see why it didn't immediately hit me. I've still got to write Rise of the Powers of X #5 (which ends the larger story) and there's a couple of epilogues (which arguably end the largest story), but Powers isn't Immortal, in a real and fundamental way. Whatever I was writing in that book is in that book, and the story I'm telling is the story I was telling. Whenever they do a Complete Immortal X-men, that'll be it.
As always, it's a mixture of things I had planned from the off and huge things which jumped me, dragged me into an alleyway and gave me money (being mugged by an idea is is very different from a real one). There's certainly a theme to the last issue which has coalesced hard.
While I've enjoyed this period, I'm also looking forward to it being over – just the post-book unwind and the post-play interviews. I may even actually get around to doing my notes on the Immortal X-men playlist. I say I'll do that on most projects, but I think I may on this one.
Anyway – let's end this, as Rise of the Powers of X #2 is out next week, so I'll be writing then. Also, I want to go and eat some soup.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
14.2.2024