282: Hold onto your delights
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Big news broke on Friday over at io9. Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles and yours truly are back together, and our graphic novel was announced, coming from Image comics on November 12th.
It's called WE CALLED THEM GIANTS. It's the story of communication across a chasm at the end of the world
Here's the relevant quotes from the article.
On where it came from.. .
“After we finished Die, we knew we wanted to do something completely different. Rather than a sprawling ongoing, do something smaller, intimate, self-contained, and really pure,” Gillen told io9 in a statement over email. “So, in the middle of the covid lockdowns, I was left alone with my cats, staring at them, and staring at me, and thinking about the miracle of relationships between beings of completely different kinds of intelligences, and the wonder of the jump across that gap. The image of the feral girl in the devastation and the giants came quickly after that, and we were away.”
On what it does...
“People will fall in love and have their hearts broken—the full Hans/Gillen experience,” Gillen continued. “Despite the post-apocalypse setting the story has an almost weird-fable kind of vibe, and ends up basically as a conversation between The Walking Dead and The Iron Giant. Basically, We Called Them Giants is the story of communication across a chasm at the end of the world. Folks have seen what Stephanie does on a month-by-month rush on an ongoing comic. Here, it’s a thrill to see her luxuriate—creating this single long story, and being able to shape the whole thing into a poignant, romantic, devastating single canvas.”
And how Stephanie feels about it...
“As an Artist, it is always a joy to work on new challenges, especially when it is with such a great Writer. Kieron wrote an emotional story in which he let me go wild on designs,” Hans added in her own statement. “It’s a new, beautiful end of the world tale, a little bit epic, a bit nostalgic and a bit contemplative. It’s nothing like we did before. In all the best ways.”
I'm deeply excited to be doing this. That it's 20 years since I made my first sale and this is the first thing I've done in a stand alone format feels actively weird. I talk about how I think of almost everything I do as a novel, and it's certainly how I think about it... but I really should have found a way to do this sooner. I suspect I should write more about this at length down the line.
I've been alluding to this for a while, as regular readers will know. It was the story I handed over to Stephanie on January 1st 2023, and she spent the year (and change) drawing it. The whole thing is done and lettered, bar tweaks (time to consider everything as a whole is an advantage of the format, certainly). The nature of a graphic novel means you want to get things done earlier, and get it into more hands. Also, hardback printing is no joke.
As such, there's plenty of time to pre-order. You can speak to your local comic or book shop. It's already up on the big online shops. . (B&N/Amazon US/UK).
It's a way off, so I don't want to say too much yet. They'll be much more talk down the line, and I'd love that folks really fall in love with the book when they pick it up - it's a book about mystery and discovery, as Stephanie's cover shows, so keeping that is precious. It's simultaneously in the emotional terrain that folks know we love, while also being really, very different. I talked a lot about wanting to do a story that was purer. As in, DIE was really about 6 people and how a fantasy world externalises their inner lives and trauma, and allowed them to interact with it in a dramatic fashion... but then I also made it the entire history of an artform, and a bunch of other stuff. Working with this more restrained canvas really has focused my attention on the fundamentals.
Stephanie, of course, sings.
Here's some unlettered pages we've released, for a taste.
Out November 12th.
I'm at GOSH on May 2nd, Free Comic Book Day!
Come say Hi! I will sign stuff and likely yabber at you. Details here. There's plenty more on too, as described below...
- We had Katie West do some editorial work on We Called Them Giants circa the lettering past, and she was amazing. She's been doing bits of editing for some years now, but she's just launched her site advertising her services. There's a quote from me on there. I think she's great, and if you need an editor, you should definitely go look.
- Luciano Vecchio's X-men monday interview. Luciano has taken over for RB for the last issue of rotPoX which is obviously a hard gig... but I think he's done some astounding things. I don't want to overhype it, as I think people should approach it clearly, but I've rarely met an artist who so obviously loves the characters he's drawing.
- Talking about my friends in Scotland, Jamie McKelvie writes about his DSTLRY book One For Sorry over in his newsletter. The first new McKelvie book in years. Clearly, you should be excited for this.
- Comrade Rossignol and famous concept artist Ian McQuee are running a kickstarter for a fiction-infused art book, Mileships. This is just beautiful stuff. Do click.
- Quinns reviews HEART, the RRD game which I'll be doing an Actual Play of sooner or later.
- Chip's newsletter pointed me at a director friend of his, who created this nightmare vision. The best AI art is anti-AI art, I guess.
I wanted this newsletter to be a long one, as it's been a while and there's a lot to talk about. In practise, I can't do that. It's the sort of week when I would be skipping a newsletter so I can concentrate on the other things I have to do, but “actual book announcement” is literally the thing the mailing list exists for.
It's been a hellish few weeks in the industry, in a few ways. The big one is one I'm unsure whether I can can paraphrase shortly, and I'm also unsure whether writing at length would be have been any more useful. I've talked about Piskor with almost all my comic friends, and everyone has their own powerful response, approaching it at different angles. I almost wrote something about it all just for myself, just to see if I can get my own brain straighter, and didn't – partially from time, partially as realising I'd be trying to write my way out of a hole which has no top. The desire to linearise things is a weakness of mine. I want things to make sense and some things don't. I suspect suicide almost always one of them. I think of what I can say and it basically comes down to sympathies to those mourning Piskor's death or caught in the fall out, and anger at anyone using this as an excuse or ammunition for harassment. It's all deeply upsetting.
On a personal level, it's been packed, and on a work level, it's been more so. After being a relatively painless process, my non-comics job needs major rewrites in a significant section on a tight deadline, requiring throwing the rest of my schedule in the air. I've had to push back writing issue 2 of The Power Fantasy until next week, for example. Stephanie is still waiting for the basic character bible for the next project together – though it exists in a relatively short 4000 word draft I'll carve out time to prod into reasonableness soon enough.
Along this, we've been working on the design for We Called Them Giants and The Power Fantasy. The latter is most pressing, and also the more demanding job, as it's going to integrate in several ways and Rian Hughes was attacking it in all sorts of ways. We at least have something now, which I like, but you look at the PDFs of alternative ideas and think of those alternate timelines. I've also finally managed to talk to an editor about pulling together a reprint project for next year.
There's also been the end of all things X-mnen. Before this, I did my lettering pass on Issue 700. As I write, I see Jordan is uploading the PDFs of some of the final Krakoan issues. The last issue of Rise of the Powers of X will be following next week or so. I was doing the PDF notes on it, and writing my final Krakoan datapages. Soon, I'm out.
I swear, I've been saying for months – maybe 6 months – that my life should simplify soon, and that just hasn't been true. But it feels more possibly true now than it has been. In a week or two, the X disappears. The non-comics job dials down hugely... and we're just on the Power Fantasy and the new Stephanie book.
I will inevitably fill the space, somehow, likely in a poorly thought out way.
Personal life? As Spring starts to arrive, there's been more room for family trips. We went to a place near Bath for the Easter weekend, which was great to see everyone. Hilariously, we went to a 90s retro night last weekend, which I both enjoyed and also spent a chunk of time with my head resting on the table, writing a new Phonogram epilogue volume in my head.
Also, Iris is a delight. Hold onto your delights.
Kieron Gillen
London
17.4.2024