287: Luciano is the real hero
Hullo.
PoX on all your HoXs
Hellbound
Bathbound
Links
Bye
Big week. The Last Issue of Rise of the Powers of X, which is a whole lot. The epilogue is next week, which is also big in its own way (both being an enormous issue and the final grace notes we hit – there's one which I'm especially happy to have pulled off), but this is where all the cosmic Dominion Us vs Them adventures conclude. Moira vs Xavier, the Phoenix vs Enigma, as above so below and all that jazz.
But I wanted to talk a little about Luciano Vecchio, who joins us on art in this issue.
When we discovered RB wouldn't be on the last issue, we talked about who was available. RB is a hard person to understudy at the best of times – no-one really looks like him, so there's always going to be an aesthetic switch. This is far from the best of times. It's not ideal to step on any last issue in a series. When it's the last issue of the story of the last few years of X books, it's something else. Plus the deadline. Plus the difficulty of the material.
In the end, for all I love his Art-Adams-influenced work, I said we should go for Luciano for a simple reason: he was one of us. The other artistw who were available weren't Krakoan artists. If we're ending the era, it should be a Krakoan.
I think that was a wise decision. When the pages came back, one thing was clear – Luciano absolutely adores the X-men. I want to highlight what he's achieved here, and my huge admiration for him. Throughout my script, I was describing the shortcuts I would advise taking to not kill yourself. I knew what I was writing had a brutal cosmic scale, but I wrote some bare minimum solutions which would do what was required and absolutely work.
Luciano did not do the bare minimum, at any point. The pages he's done in the sequences have the impact when you just read it, but I urge people to come back and really look closely. Any possible cheat is dodged. He does everything. As I said, his love of X just comes through in every line in every panel. I can't believe he did it all in the time we had available.
The end of the Krakoan age was always going to be about heroism. For all the characters achieve, I think Luciano is the real hero of this issue. Applause.
That's the first page, and the rest of the preview is here.
I'm also doing the framing story in the X-men wedding special. It's Marvel's Pride special, and basically is an anthology book centered around Destiny and Mystique renewing their vows. There's lots of excellent other creators in here, exploring what other things happened around the wedding.
This is set between the incoming and outgoing administrations - I'm both giving a little after credit scene to my Immortal X-men stories, and setting up what's coming next. It's not quite up with the weeks when I had Uber and Young Avengers drop in the same week, but in terms of tonal difference, this and rotPoX5 is certainly notable.
This is me and Rachael Stott fucking around. While there's absolutely heart in there, it's one of the campest things I've ever written. I kinda wish it came out after X-men 750, so it'd be my last Marvel book of my stay.
Here's the first page...
...and you can read the rest of the preview here.
We're starting to reveal The Power Fantasy cast. Over at IGN, we gave some art and details of one of our cover stars.
Meet Eliza Hellbound.
The first image is from cover, the second was a development image Caspar created to get her vibe, the third is playing with costumes (though Eliza isn't exactly tied to any costume) and the forth is an unlettered part of the first issue. And here's some quotes...
"With any new story, meeting the cast is such a huge part," Gillen tells IGN. "You do that at every stage - from announcement, to first cover, to first page. So now we get closer to release, actually starting to share stuff is hugely exciting. Caspar and I have been dreaming this up forever, and now we get to Show and Tell. The story is about six people with the power to destroy the earth, trying to get on. Who they are is the heart of the story, so meeting them is huge."
Gillen continues, "We thought an introduction to one of the cover stars would be fun. We're basing character names off the stage names that were common in the period they appeared - she's kind of our puritanical post-punk character who spent most the early 80s in a magical squat in London before (er) becoming who she became. She's called Eliza Hellbound, because she knows exactly who she is."
"Eliza is definitely the most ‘me’ character, at least in terms of design," Wijngaard says. "On paper she evokes my love for JRPGs and Fantasy, twisting armor with fashion over function attire. They are is also an extremely pained and in a constant spiral of emotional turmoil, the red mood present is a constant reminder of the monstrous forces she's got herself eternally tied too."
You can read the rest of the article here..
(Er... just to say it, the tagline is a little deceptive. That's not the book at all. I mention that the book's tone is between the poles of Watchmen and The Boys. Annoyingly, the best one liner I have so far is between The Wicked + the Divine and Uber, which is more than a little monomanical.)
Talk to your retailer. Talk to your friends. Talk to your loved ones, but just about stuff you want to talk about, you should speak to people you love at every chance you get.
PC Gamer had their 30 year anniversary last year, and asked a bunch of ex-writers to talk about their time working for them.
I actually started my responses with “these may be uncharacteristically brief”. This was not true, even slightly. There's certainly times I realise how I managed to write as many pages as I did for the mag.
Here's my full (if slightly edited, just for extraneous stuff) answers. For folks who know me from those days, it'll be a fun nostalgia trip and peak behind the curtain. For those who don't know my pre-history at all, it may be illuminating of the pool which I emerged from. Actually, re-reading it, some of this is surprisingly personal. I often think that my time on PCG is a period I've never really mined to use in fiction – I had a comic called Multimedium I pitched to Image after Phonogram which was the closest I got.
Can you talk a little bit about yourself and how your career led you to work on PC Gamer magazine?
I was an obsessive fan of games journalism generally and Amiga Power specifically. I half-suspect I subconsciously fluffed my A-levels so I could do my degree (Applied Biology) in Bath rather than my first-choice of Nottingham to be in Future's vague orbit. I got offered work at the end of my first year, when a DJ came up and asked me if I wanted to. This wasn't the usual way of getting into games journalism, even in the 90s. I did a bunch of freelance which paid for my second year during AP's Byzantine period, and then it closed. When I left University in 1998, I was looking for work which wasn't too much like actual work. I applied for the PC Gamer Staff Writer position, turned up in a green suit and a metal T-shirt, and they offered me it. That I had only actually owned a PC for a few months led to an intensive period of catching up and bluff. That period never really ended.
What are your memories of the PC gaming industry at the time of your tenure on the mag?
Transitional. The Playstation fueled money-bloat of the 90s was starting to cool down, and the ridiculous marketing spends were starting to disappear (which was probably for the best). Half-life's just came out the month after I arrived, and I view that as kind of the end of the 1990s and the start of the 00s, artistically speaking. Online play was moving from something more fringe to something absolutely core - MMOs started to blow up. When I was a kid, if you really loved games, you loved all games - we were deeply omnivorous. As the 90s hit, you started to get players who were fans of one genre. By the time I was on PCG, we were heading into an era where some players were just fans of one game - your Counterstrikes, your World of Warcrafts, whatever. Budgets were increasing, which meant that more fringe and weird PC Games were having a hard time justifying themselves - there's a string of great games circa 2000 that just crashed and burned. Smaller teams were thought dead - and that only really turned around in the late 00s when the indie renaissance kicked in. It's worth thinking of the long game there too - for example, Planescape Torment didn't sell, but you it was one which absolutely inspired people. Something like Disco Elysium feels like a 20-years later "We told you all this stuff was great!"
On the magazine side, you would not believe the real rivalry, backstabbing and aggressive competition between the PC Games magazines. It was genuinely inspiring levels of fuckery. The month all 3 PC Games mags ran a Commandos 2 cover was a great example - PCG had the exclusive, but the other two had managed to source the assets from foreign mags and ran it before we did. Genuinely hilarious.
Do you have any memorable anecdotes or memories from your time on the mag?
There were a lot of messy adventures. We were all in our twenties, and basically treated it as an extension of our student life, a kind of boozy postgrad in games. I think it was actually wilder just before I arrived - everyone talked about sleeping in the office on particularly brutal deadlines, which I never did. There was still a lot of write all day, party all night. PC Gamer was something of a pirate crew of a magazine - which was more common in the industry when I started PC Gamer, but gradually declined, and by the time I was freelance, PCG was one of the last of the swaggering crews. It was a weird life. Hell. I used to get into a local club for free because a bouncer really liked my review of one of the Thief games. I always remember Rossignol and I talking game theory while throwing down. Was it Flynn or Pierce who were dared in hitting on someone by saying "Q2DM1... great fucking level"?
But if I'm giving a single story, here's a less decadent one. Ashton was about to go and redesign the magazine, which meant that he and the other higher ups were going to have 2 weeks away from the mag. On the way home from the pub, he asks me if I can handle looking after the mag for that period. I'm only reviews editor. It's a lot of responsibility.
Next day, I wake up, and feel off. I go to work, and then go home. I'm coming through the door, and feel the worst pain in my life, and drop to the floor. I have no idea what's going on. Ashton gets me into hospital, and they spend a week trying to work out what's wrong with me. It's only on the Friday when they open me up to try and get to the bottom of it. Last memory before going under was the Doctor, having realised my day job, tells me that he's a huge fan of comedy doctor game THEME HOSPITAL.Just as the blackness consumes me I think: "Oh god. I'm going to die."
They discover it's just my Appendix, which they missed because my organ was on the wrong side. Crappy mutant power, I know.
Anyway, point being - PC Gamer visited all the time. I remember Kate Little saying a friend of hers was weirded out that she was going in like she did. "He's just a work colleague - isn't this a bit too much?" Looked coldly, and it seems so... but it didn't feel strange on the inside. It wasn't just a work colleague. It was a PC Gamer colleague.
That was PC Gamer, for me. It was a gang, in all the best and worst ways.
Or maybe it was because Ashton believed he caused the illness by the sudden stress of me having to run the mag, and he bullied everyone into coming.
For the record, down the line, when I was Deputy Editor, I actually did sign off a whole issue once. There has never been a more typoed riddled issue of PC Gamer printed.
Can you recall your favourite pieces of PC Gamer magazine content that you produced while working on the mag (can be anything you did)?
In terms of my time on the mag, my Deus Ex review is the one everyone talks about. It was a big swaggering review of a game I adored, and powered by a recent break-up. Some people go to the gym and transform themselves. I decided that I'd show what she was missing in the medium of a PC Games review. Even worse, it worked. 20-somethings are weird.
When I was Freelance, the epic the Cradle piece I wrote for Mark Donald deserves a mention. A sprawling piece of maps, interviews, examination, theory and everything else. It's rare that a game has a level good enough to justify that kind of exploration, so I was incredibly grateful that Mark gave me the space to go for it.
Basically, I wrote a lot about Immersive Sims over the years, before that name was even coined. The first game review for PC Gamer I got published was Thief. I thought them, my Velvet Underground, and I, their Lester Bangs. I was never afraid of being called wanky.
In the same vein, can you recall your favourite PC Gamer magazine cover (or covers)?
If I think back I mainly think of ones which went drastically wrong. Cover art turning up and the whole team just despairing that it was so terrible and we had to somehow make it into a useable cover. And no matter how good or bad it was, inevitably someone would doodle an enormous penis on it the second it arrived and say "Oh god - what are EA thinking? We can't use this. It's got a huge dong on its forehead."
Yes, games magazines were somewhat blokey back then.
The single cover which immediately leaped to mind was actually our Halo preview cover. I believe we were the first magazine in the world to do one. I saw it at E3, and wrote the feature up (which basically took me off the radar - there was a story that I had actually had a breakdown when EA refused Matt Pierce and myself access to some game or another, I'd told them YOU'RE THROUGH and stormed off into LA to scream at skyscrapers.) No, I was sitting by a pool, drinking Margaritas and writing a big burst of hyperbole.
Anyway - issue comes out with the cover. Decent enough. In retrospect, Ashton wished he had added an exclamation mark after the MEET THE GAME OF THE YEAR, but you can't have everything.
After the issue has gone to press and is on the way to the shops, it's announced that Halo is going to be an X-box exclusive.
Lowest selling issue of the year.
Fuckers.
Also, what has been your favourite section of the magazine to read / write (can include current sections or those that have since gone)?
The playful dumb stuff. Anything with puns. The news section. The reviews big words.
I'm sort of known for my punning , in my work and when I was on twitter. I didn't always have a particular interest in puns. It was absolutely trained into me at PC Gamer. We'd be sitting there, and someone would shout out the basis of a story or a game like "Flight sim, not very good" and the whole office would shout out puns to use in the titlet, in a word-play deathmatch. It was a gym for that kind of stuff.
What are your thoughts on the PC gaming industry today and how it has evolved over the past 30 years?
I've been distant in the last decade since I stopped writing for Rock Paper Shotgun. I've enjoyed seeing it develop and the bits and pieces working its way back to me. I like being a retired senile old man in the pavilion while the cricket continues apace.
I'll say that the single most hilarious thing is that we can't buy new graphic cards because other people are buying them to make computer money. That's some sci-fi comedy right there.
Who is the most interesting person you've ever spoken to / interviewed in the PC gaming industry?
I'd rather not choose - there were a bunch of great people. I was never a great interviewer, but I occasionally got people talking - I clearly had thought about this stuff a bunch and had a cheat mode to buy credibility (I looked up everyone on mobygames to see their previous games from another company, and when I revealed I knew this, they all thought I was a fucking wizard.)
Let's say Lord British, who I visited circa Ultima IX. He showed us around his mansion, which was some excitable Batman secret base. He had caverns and secret passages and an actual Sputnik capsule bought off the russians. We got around to doing the interview, which seemed to go well - lots of stuff, from a unique individual.
I got home, and discovered nothing had recorded.
I pieced together a feature, but what a loss, right?
What's your favourite PC game of all time? Or, even better, what's your all-time top 5?
I'll say that the PC Gamer Top 100 was my favourite feature. Back then, lists weren't so common as they are now, and that the magazine got together and argued it together was something I always looked forward to - even when it turned into a knife-fight, which was often. If you don't care enough to stab a peer over their opinion of ZangbandTK, what's the point?
I'm going to not overthink this and lob some stuff down specifically from my years in the trenches. Fuck it, I'll do a top 10, as I cannot be contained. From 1 to 10...
Deus Ex. Planescape Torment. Thief: The Dark Project Medieval: Total War World of Goo Civilization IV Company Of Heroes ZangbandTK Sacrifice Audiosurf
What are you playing on PC right now?
I'm not! My gaming is mostly tabletop rpgs at the moment - with my job, I need something more expressly social, and the games I most loved on the PC were intense, solitary affairs. If I played them, my wife would divorce me. That said, I did just buy a new PC, so you never know if I'll come back and play something properly. I really want to carve out time to do Disco Elysium - I occasionally see games arrive and am aware that they're exactly the sort of thing I'd be writing hot takes about were I working now. Elysium was an obvious one of them. Obra Dinn was another. Hades too - though I actually did play that a bunch.
On my wife's Switch. Sorry.
I am presently also playing a lot of Marvel Snap, which I probably should sync with my PC. You can imagine me laughing when something I invented turns up. Looking at you, Sinister London, you scamp.
Lastly, are there any parting comments you have on PC Gamer magazine and its place in the PC gaming industry?
When I arrived into games journalism, there was a clear truism born of all the evidence - games mags basically lasted for five years, tops. That's just how it works. PC Gamer has proved that wrong, and has become something more than an institution. Even way back then, people were still saying "PC Gaming is dying" and we (and PC Gamer) continues to dance on everyone else's corpses. The idea that a games mag could last 30 years was unthinkable, and PC Gamer showed that it wasn't.
(Edge too, but as always, DEATH TO EDGE! DEATH TO THE ETERNAL ENEMY! I'm reminded of the first time I freelanced for them, and I asked another writer for advice. "Just write what you would do for PC Gamer, and take out all the jokes." Wise.)
Will Half-Life 3 ever come out?
I never even knew it was gay.
I'll bet someone else does that joke.
- I'll write more about this next week, but my friends at Rowan Rook & Decard have just launched a crowdfunder at Backerkit for their new game, Hollows. I played one of the betas and loved this, and I'm actually writing one of the Hollows (the dungeons of the game) for the first stretch goal. Go nose!
- I'm a month late to this, but Pankaj Mishra's piece on The Shoah After Gaza for the London Review Of Books is wide-ranging, well-researched, deeply upsetting and definitive.
- In a sentence I can't quite believe I'm writing, I think this is the definitive piece on Man Vs Bear.
I'm feeling a little under the weather, so I'll wrap this up quickly. The main work in this week was continuing to get things ready for The Power Fantasy's launch (I think I've finally got alt covers sorted for the first six issues or so, which is something I really should have nailed down months ago) and wrap up a couple of things. One was a short story for an anthology (which is a playful little satirical tech-bro story) and the other being a 10 page chunk of Stephanie and my next project, which I sent over yesterday. There was a moment half way through writing that where it changed shape, as I realised what it as missing. The outline was rock solid, which was the problem – it needed to be more fluid than that. I'm happy with it, though Stephanie has yet to read it, so it may be bullshit.
Next up is the next issue of The Power Fantasy. Caspar is motoring through the issue he has, on a 4-5 page a week beat, which means that I have to keep him fed. That I have the first 12 nailed down does mean that I can do this – and the next issue is one that I'm really looking forward to doing.
I also have to do my Taxes, which I'm less looking forward to doing.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Not London
29.5.2024