285: hiring Ste
Hullo.
Forever Changes
Ex Crawling
Hashtags
Links
War
Bye
The end of X-Men Forever, so the end of Immortal X-men.
Also my last issue with Luca, who jumped aboard this coda – a nightmare job, for multiple levels. Picking up something as intricate as Immortal? Difficult. Doing it in the time he had? Murderous. He's very much Hope, heading across the wasteland, packing a gun and trying to kill this monster.
However, it's not just all Phoenix stuff. It's also the end of the whole Destiny/Mystique arc that's been bubbling on since at least issue 3.
Which is where we start. Here's the opening.
More details and the rest of the preview over here
Nearly there now. The last issue of Fall of the Powers of X would be next week. The week after is Rise of the Powers of X. And then, finally, on June 10th X-men 700 to wrap up Krakoa.
Also out today! DIE Scenarios volume 1 is shipping to everyone who pre-ordered, and the PDF is available to download instantly. You can also just buy it now if you haven't already. The hardcopy comes with a free PDF, and you can buy the PDF separately for a mere £7.50.
It's got three fully developed scenarios in it. Laurie O'Connel's Where The Vile Things Are has big folk-horror vibes and set in a discipline and cruelty heavy Summer camp, and really digs deep into showing how persona can be showcases. Nathan Blades I Go Infinite pushes the formalism, with players who are all professional collectable card game players, and a world-generation method which includes guides how to interpret any collectible card game into an encounter generator. My own Bizarre Love Triangles is basically the biggest DIE adventure I've ever written, a Hex Crawl format where you played people hung up on their past lovers. So Ex-Crawl. Yes, I know.
Folks are talking about it over at the DIE Discord, so if you're interested in DIE RPG, do consider popping in. Folks are very sweet.
Have I done a proper break down for how I constructed Bizarre Love Triangles yet? I don't think I have. I'll add it to a next one, as could be a fun exercise.
Here's the link to buy again – and it can also be ordered from your local comics/game shop too.
#newcomics
I'll write more about this when I next do my capsule review round ups, but I've started tagging my comics talk with #newcomics on Blue Sky. I'd encourage folks to do it as well.
I think we need more nuclei of conversation around books – what's new, what people are digging and so on. The advantage of a big two book is always there's a pre-existing fanbase to be part of. They're there, ready to chat.
(It comes with big disadvantages too, obviously.)
With the splintering of the online space, I think some attempts to try and do and let folks who want to know about stuff find one another is worthwhile. I was chatting with a friend who was arguing that traditional online marketing is basically worthless now. I suspect they're right, and there's two tactics there. One is to go the other route – more physical, more real space. The other is to try and rebuild an online community, in some way. Not easy.
The physical stuff isn't any easier. When there was the recent conversation from retailers who were doing poorly, the one story which stuck in my mind was that Covid simply broke the shop model – in a way which is similar how it broke small music venues. People don't go out for anything but big events and they don't hang anywhere, and comic shops run off people coming in regularly and so having more chances to be exposed to more comics.
That "footfall" ideas is true digitally. The more folk talk about a book, the more chances someone is exposed to it as an idea. I was never more aware of the weirdness of the world when WicDiv was taking off – the bigger it was, the easier it was to sell more books, by those mass dynamics.
I think of talking to a screenwriter I knew who put a big truth very simply – the real big reason people remake old stuff? It isn't primarily about the pre-existing fanbases (if it was, they'd only be re-making the stuff with huge fanbases, and they remake anything). The big reason is simply name recognition. If folks know the name, they don't need to be taught to remember the name. Re-making all the old stuff is just saving millions from the marketing budget. There's no reason for (say) the Fall Guy to be called the Fall Guy. It's mainly a budgetary concern.
The new has things cut out for it, basically. I've said before, but I think of how Andrew Hickey ends every single one of his 500 Songs podcasts – that word of mouth is the best advertisement for marginal indie works. It's the biggest deal. Even the biggest comics are indie works in the larger scale of things.
Also there's the awful truth about humanity which has shaped social media businesses – angry people interact more than happy people, so it's more profitable and viral to make people angry. This seems to be part of human nature. Which means that we, as people, have to be conscious about that and try to not just do what the bundle of nerves in our head wants to.
Me trying to do more little posts about things I've read is one way I've been trying to do that, and #newcomics-ing them is a way to encourage others to do it too.
Anyway – this was meant to be a one line post “I'm skeeting with #newcomics” to set up an essay down the line, and now I've written this little ramble through where my head is.
Of course, I'm absolutely putting the horse before the hashtag here. I've only skeeted one with it at the time of writing. Hopefully I'll have done more before the time I do this. Or maybe I'll RT some with the hashtag? Man, look at me writing stream of consciousness.
I'm not just thinking "a hashtag?" I also have a few other ideas along these lines, which I'll be exploring. The fun thing of being out of Marvel that I can turn more of my brain on this. I'm thinking physical as much as digital too.
- Steve Albini died this week, which was a shock. Obviously a titan of alternative rock, both in his work as a
producerengineer, musician and songwriter, but outside his professional achievements, one of the most regular refrains after his passing was how much people view him as a rolemodel for Gen X creatives. I don't think anyone was more of an exemplar of edgelordism as an aesthetic, and how he changed and owned what he grew to see clearly as an error in his later years is a something I think about a lot.
- Chrissy writes on what a great audience is, in different art forms. I loved this. Poetry vs Abba. Fight!
- Gerry does a Krakoa-era round-up of photographs of his peers. They really do look like a band, sometimes. I do wish I was ever in a room at one of the summits. I've been a part of this whole thing from a shed in South London.
- Asher Elbein writes on the Judgment Of Magneto, about the character's route, its parallels with the real world, Zionism and lots more. This is great work, and made me appreciate Al's great work even more than I already did.
- I admire Keith Stuart for this one. He writes a Top 15 article of the greatest UK Videogame magazines of all time – a topic that could only provoke a knife-fight among games people of a certain age. How important the mags were is likely incomprehensible to anyone under 30 and not British and nerdy . I think my Amiga Power fanboyism is right at the root of so much I am as a creative, for example. I turn up in the article, because when Keith said he was doing it, I was passing through twitter, and despite basically being retired from the site, it was enough to make me actually post saying if it's Edge, it'll be war.
- It was Edge.
I said I'd try and give a bit more context to a bewildered non-UK person about this, I suspect I better try. For old time's sake, I will don the sweaty mask of games-journalism-me. Yeah, that guy.
Why Edge is fundamentally evil? It's a choice between "Edge is games journalism's equivalent of comics embarrassingly rebranding themselves graphic novels", "Edge's reputation exists due to the annihilation of generations of writers' identity and bylines" or "hiring Ste".
First: “"Edge is games journalism's equivalent of comics embarrassingly rebranding themselves graphic novels"
It's an industry mag – to make the industry feel better about itself (look at the paper stock! We're a real art form!) It has been, in most periods, relatively dry. I remember the first time I wrote for them, and asked a more experienced editor what to do – and they said "write what you'd do for PC Gamer, and cut the jokes". Edge cut the jokes because we were insecure about games, not getting the best cultural writing has always been witty and playful. The Radiohead fan in you is just wrong. A well-turned funny sentence is a sign of intelligence, not a rejection of it. To use Amiga Power's J Nash's line, Funny need not mean Joking.
It's sold to people who would like to think they were part of the industry, or aspire to be. But magazines aren't part of the industry. They're about the industry, and so – at the heart – at least partially antagonistic to it. That the industry loved Edge as an object so much is the reason why you fundamentally couldn't trust it. It wasn't on our side. It was on their side, and sold to the part of you which wanted to be inside the magic circle.
They pulled it off. The magazine is beautiful. It always has been. Back when they started, they did things no-one else was doing . They were absolutely ground-breaking. I looked at it suspiciously the whole time I was doing so, but I bought Edge for the first 65 issues or so. Know your enemy.
Yes – important to get the subtext here: this whole little essay is about the narcissism of small differences.
I think they're a brilliant magazine in achieving their goals. I just disagree with their goals.
I suspect Gandalf would be really impressed with what Sauron did to pull the one Ring together.
(The sort of nerdy reference which Edge would shy away from. Yet again, the aesthetic clash.)
I think think this whole reason is the one why it annoyed me most that Edge top the list – it's a list of the best UK videogame magazines and the one that is least like what a UK games magazine does is number 1. It is a fundamental diss of everything I loved about the British games press, the anomaly is hailed as the exemplar. The best isn't the ones which pushed the format to breaking point– Amiga Power, for example. The one which hated the format
It's as if a list of great Disco Records put a prog one on top.
As an aside, and pulling the mask off for a second, the real problem with a list like this is that Edge's sheer length of publication. Like PC Gamer, it's existed way longer than anyone ever thought a game mag could go on for. Most game mags live for 5 years, tops – a generation. Even in five years, mags have different periods - early Crash was hugely different from late Crash. Edge has had a series of golden ages – some I liked more, some I liked less. Keith calls out the early 2000s as one of them, and I'd agree – that magazine was electrifying.
That change across the years leads to my second point : “Edge's reputation exists due to the annihilation of generations of writers' identity and bylines”. That's something they've stepped away from – I understand there's lots of bylines in Edge now, which is a great thing. However, for all those years, they had none, and everyone was concealed behind the imperious Edge. Now, I do get it. There's clearly advantages to this – no-one can be targeted, the grandeur of an Edge opinion, when they started no-one else was doing it, complete rejection of the personality-forward school of brit games journalism, etc.
Some of the best writers the industry has ever had have been Edge writers. They came there, as it was the only place to be self-consciously serious about games. That early-2000s golden age I mentioned? No bylines, except the columnists, so even I – who was down the fucking corridor from them – had no real idea who wrote what.
I hate Edge as it hid them, took their brilliance and said it was theirs. I hate that for the same reason I hate the comic companies which hid creators' byline. It removes power from the creators and passes it to a company.
(I mentioned this on Blue Sky, and a freelance writer mentioned that they were told off for even including a list of articles they'd done for Edge on their website. That is some infuriating bullshit. Your portfolio matters.)
As a writer, all you ever have is your byline. All those great writers, in that period, made the Faustian deal – write for Edge, they will own your voice for as long as you're there. They did it as they loved games, and there really is nothing else like Edge in existence at the time. If I hadn't been indoctrinated by Amiga Power by this point, I suspect I'd have been tempted too.
(Instead, I did my best to warp PC Gamer to my own image, but that's another story.)
However, there's an irony. There's no magazine where I was less precious about my copy than Edge, in the relatively few times I wrote for them (Which is understandable, from Edge's perspective, innit? I said shit like this all the time when I was a games journo. This is not an endearing habit.) I didn't care, because I didn't have a byline. Once, they tweaked a score of mine once without asking, and added a last paragraph to justify it (breaking the whole review's cascading rhythm). You'd think I'd be furious. The few times that happened elsewhere, I hit the roof, and swore off working for the mag and told them so. They'd attached my name to something I simply didn't believe. With Edge? Whatever. Clearly it shows contempt for me, but really – I just don't care. The money spends either way.
(It's worth stressing, I'm not objecting to the change of score. A magazine gets to define what the scores mean, and what they give out. I don't decide what a 3/10 means – the mag does. When I was a section editor, I'd regularly call up a reviewer and tell them the score didn't match the review, so either they change the copy or the score. Normally downwards – there was a tendency for writers to throw out hyperbolic negative metaphors and still give a game 65% or whatever. The thing is: I called them and told them, and if they didn't want to change things, I'd have let them pull their byline. Not that they ever did, that I can recall. I digress.)
Back to the point: Edge became Edge because they kept the Edge writers in the cave, toiling away.
Which brings me to my third point – “Hiring Ste”.
I obviously initially wrote that as a joke, but now I've written all this out, I'm thinking of the truth of it. Ste Curran was one of the writers on the mag in that period I mentioned earlier. He was one of the people who made it sing, and did work which he deserved credit for.
He didn't get it. None of them got it. Edge got it.
I love the Edge writers. I wished there was a home in the industry for them other than Edge.
And now, the mask off: I have to say how delighted I was with Keith doing this. It's not as if I was tasked with writing a top 15 games mags of all time I wouldn't have included Edge, somewhere. Maybe beneath GamesTM? The world is hell, and it's been a pleasure to get properly annoyed about something so relatively unimportant in the larger scale of things. It almost made me miss games journalism. Almost.
Okay – with two rambles which went on longer than intended (the Edge one started as a 30 word entry in the links section). I'm going to try and keep this outro short. The length of the rest of the newsletter came from where I am with work. My main thing this week is working on the first issue of a new thing for Stephanie. I've written five pages or so, but I feel that I need to build up more pressure in my head before attacking the page more – it needs more intense concentration and velocity. Also, there's a lot of The Power Fantasy stuff flying around – lettering notes on issue 1, commissioning covers, chatting to Caspar about issue 2's scripts and so on. When you're launching two big indie projects simultaneously, the change of gear is actively derailing.
After I get today's bitty stuff out the way, I plan to basically write exploratively, letting the cast chat and get far more material than I need. It's a genre book, but it works on the same naturalistic approach that DIE did. You need to do that.
I mentioned the big exciting thing without stressing it – the lettering of The Power Fantasy #1. Now, there's always work to do after first lettering for an issue 1, but the main response was relief. And delight. It hits, and hits hard. The folks who've read it in this state seem excited by it – Chrissy was amazed by what Caspar has done, and noted that this is clearly Very Much My Bullshit but with a lighter touch than most my WFH manages. I think I agree. That's the goal. I'll talk more about that later, I'm sure.
Reading it, I was also struck by something else – I'd had the art and read it with the script, but it is significantly better and more effective as a whole integrated thing. Which is stating the obvious – it should be, right? That's why we sell it as a comic. However, it was so striking that it did make me think we were onto something here. The combination is where the power is.
Still – lots to do to perfect it. Lettering tweaks, choosing what information to add and remove, Caspar doing a few more art tweaks to turn a few dials...
The other big work thing is the continuing hearing voice-actors attack my script for the non-comics WFH thing, which is just amazing. I think I said this last time, but seeing highly skilled professionals do their job is everything. It's not even anything to do with them hearing what they do with my work – it's the specifics of acting and voice directing. If you ever get a chance to see someone do this, grab it.
I also ran a one-off game of death-metal-styled fantasy RPG Mork Borg last night, and the GM treat was playing a talking horse trying to prevent these horrible little men get killed by a Cannibal Warlock.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
15.5.2024