288: Sure thing, Daddy Grant
Hullo.
You say Goodbye
I say Halo
Quasi Victorian stabbycuffs
Black and white and read all over
Canon
Links
Bye
Out today: X-men 35 (aka Uncanny X-men #700).
So ends the first Krakoan age and my time at Marvel. This is a huge issue in both ways: it's 60 pages of us wrapping Krakoa, 10 pages of Chris Claremont finally being able to write the Adler-Darkholm family as he always intended and 10 pages of Gail and Jed introducing the new administration. There's a host of artist on this one – Javier Garr'on is with Gail and Jed, while Salvador Larroca is with Claremont, but ours is absolutely a structured jam celebratory issue, with a bunch of classic X-artists and specific artists from the Krakoan period, returning to end this.
(I also have to swiftly say how much I liked Claremont writing his whole take on the whole Nightcrawler parent situation. I read it as I was doing my own lettering pass on my final issues, and tweaked to try and align it emotionally with what he does here – which shows the sort of emotional truth that he's always been a master at.)
Ours was written by Al, Gerry and myself. I suspect they'll be some speculation over who wrote what in our 60 pages, as we don't give any individual credits. The Synopsis was a joint effort, and then we just broke it down, mostly scene by scene. I think it was 25 pages for me, 25 for Gerry and 10 for Al. I basically grabbed everything I felt I needed to write, and found I already was at my allotment.
Anyway, here's a page from the preview...
I'll save any commentary for down the line. I know folks will be asking me about it in interviews soon enough, but I think the fanbase have to metabolise things without having my finger on the scales. It's certainly been frustrating with people assuming they knew how the story ended in the last few months, and the emotional tone it would take.
The Power Fantasy reveal continues, introducing our second cover star over at Screen Rant. It's Valentina, or Santa Valentina to her fans - which is most people. Well, a lot. It's complicated.
More in the article, but I say....
She's the ethical heart of the book. The good person, who really wants to save the world. Except she's not a person. She's an angel, who's come down to earth to save us all, and ideally catch as many quality gigs as possible while she's down here. Heaven is different in our universe, and it definitely doesn't have pop music.
I probably should have put quotation marks on that angel. And heaven for that matter. Anyway, Casper says...
Valentina is the heart of the series, a tiny controlled fire, warm and beautiful to look at but capable of absolute destruction. She is one of the few characters that ages less than a human would over our 50-year timeline giving me freedom to express her personality in visually exciting, period relevant ways.
The big part of this tease is actually showing some unlettered internal pages. Here's Valentina, having a conversation way back in the sixties.
Who's she talking to? We'll get to him soon enough.
We launch in August. Speak to your retailer before July 15th to pre-order – and I'm told that saying you want to subscribe is even better. You can do that digitally if you're a digital person. I mean, honestly, even just talking about a book you're excited by to your retailer or online is a huge part of orders.
My friends over at RRD are crowdfunding their next game, Hollows. The setting is a baroque magical Victorian vibes, where people get very sad, implode and form weird pocket dimension dungeons made of their trauma and obsessions. They bloat, grow and generally threaten to fuck up reality. The players are the hunters – each with enchanted weapons, feeding their own personal demons – who go in and try to stop these hollows.
They do this by exploring and big ol' boss fights.
There's lots to love here in the details (I especially like how if a character dies enough, they actually implode and become a new Hollow – essentially becoming the next dungeon for the group to traverse) but the big idea is that it's a game about boss fights. You explore these awful dreamscapes, and then you reach one of these baroque combat encounters, which play in a grid and everything. It's basically a generation on from D&D 4th edition, with a bunch of storygame designers working out how they can use it for their purposes.
I've ran one of the earliest betas, and dug it a lot – running for a group of storygamers, the main takeaway was how this stuff is fun. Like, this is the forbidden fruit for us lot, the pure ludic game stuff. Grant and Chris has managed to get meaningful meaty tactical choices into the minimum of space, encourage co-op, include lots of real prompts for emotional play and have a really cute “lock-on” esque system for the fights.
(The map of the game basically keeps the boss in the centre, and everyone else is positioned relative to it.)
Anyway, it's really neat, and I dug it so much that when they asked me if I wanted to write a Stretch Goal, I said “Sure thing, Daddy Grant”. They've already hit my stretch goal, so if you back, it'll be included. It's called A WAR TO END ALL WARS, and is about a period scientist who believed by making increasingly awful weapons he could actually create peace. He became a hollow when he realised, no, all he's done is made war even worse. The vibe would be basically be a Victorian's fantasies of what WW1 would be like, as if HG Wells worked much further into the horror register. I'm really looking forward to writing it.
Anyway! You can back here and there's a quick start to download if it takes your fancy.
This has been an interesting trend across the last decade or so – artist editions of books, presenting the work raw. Boom has done a few of their Pen And Ink editions, and are releasing Dan Mora's issue 1 of Once & Future without my words getting in the way. Well... not entirely. I write an intro for this, and give a little commentary on pages, drawing your attention to things. One for the process junkies (as in, me.)
Out in August.
Dynamite are doing a humble bundle right now, including Caspar and my PETER CANNON miniseries. The whole issue first issue is up at AIPT. I'm still really proud of this – it's a liminal book between phases of my career, and really goes for it, in a bunch of ways. It's also the book which directly led to the Power Fantasy – phonogram to its Wicdiv? Hmm. Not quite right, but there's something there.
- Aditya's newsletter was a treasure trove of links this week and if you're not subscribing, you're missing out. Is Line Editing a Lost Art?! A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle (dating back to the 1950s)! The moral economy of the shire!
- This spinning off Sabrina's Carpenter's Expresso to explore the apartheid in music broadcasting in the late 70s and early 80s is really strong. Quote: “Espresso” is a bop, and it’s pop. So too were the countless other songs from the early ’80s that sounded just like it. They were, like “Espresso,” irrepressibly happy music. Sadly, the pop designation for the genre with no name came too late for its originators, many of whom are now underground in the literal sense of the term. This summer, I hear music in the streets, and it makes me smile. But I also can’t stop hearing another song, a ballad of irretrievable loss. And the beat goes on.”
I spent last week in a farmhouse in Northern France, living a somewhat bucolic life. If you want to imagine a scene: Dusk. I am sitting in the French countryside with friends, sipping red wine, looking thoughtfully at the dying light play across the beautiful rustic farmhouses. I finally break the silence.
"These would be amazing Warhammer scenery if they were much smaller"
I had to work a little, but I managed to keep it to the mornings. It was mainly getting the pages over to Stephanie for the new project, which she liked, and then reworking them to hit even harder. It was basically a “Why not turn this 10 page sequence into a 12 page sequence” as it'll hit harder. Space is meaning and all that.
I'm still in Power Fantasy design work as well – Rian's got back with a second draft of internals, which I'll be giving notes on after this. There's also a bunch of teasers we're working on, which should be also ready soon. I suspect they'll start to leak out before the next time we talk.
Before writing this I also finished a draft of the issue of Power Fantasy I was working on. One of the big things in the book is its use of timeline – it's set from 1945 to 1999, and this is the one where we most use that so far. The trick is working out how to tie it into the present-day narrative, so the book doesn't grind to a halt. I think we've pulled it off, but I also suspect by this point in the story, folks' curiosity of what actually has happened earlier will be enough to make them invest. I was talking to Eric this week about some character development work we did early on which we shared, and the “wait – they looked like this in 1960 and look like this in 1990. What the fuck happened?” is very real.
Anyway – I'll be polishing that off before Friday and getting it over, to stay ahead. After that, I'll likely head back to the Stephanie Project – or, alternatively, finish my third scenario for DIE RPG. I also likely need to start thinking more intensely about what I'm going to do with Rowan Rook & Decard's Heart Game I'm running for an actual play. I mean, torture everyone with a fucked up meaty dungeon, obviously, but specifics probably matter.
I also need to warm up my GMing a bit – the main game I've been in for the last 6 months has been as a player. I managed to run a Mork Borg game a couple of weeks back, and a Teeth: Night of the Hogmen last night. I'm starting to get brain space to try and arrange something. It'd be good to do an in the flesh game, as that's been forever.
Oh – and I bought a Steamdeck last night, figuring Surviving The Experience deserved me splashing out on something. I have been chewing it over for a while. The thing that stopped me is that I don't play videogames any more. However, the other part of me thought... maybe I would play games if I had a Steamdeck. I'm only slightly joking – a personal space, away from the work-PC, which is actually accessible? That would open things up. There's also quite a lot of travel in my near future – I'm going to Gencon, and then back to London for TPF's launch, then up to Worldcon, and somewhere else. That's way longer than I'd like, so maybe a Steamdeck will be useful.
Of course, now I'll discover my wrists break when I try to lift it or something.
I haven't said much about Worldcon? I'm going. I've got a few things I plan to do (a comics masterclass and a live panel DIE game – reprising Panelbleed from Tbubz), as well as whatever panels that'll have me. Also it's nice to be in Glasgow, a city I also love.
Final update on Kieron Is Still On His Bullshit. I think I mentioned I'm not taking my phone down to the shed, so I don't tether it to my Mac and access the net. This means that I can't use my playlists - however, I do have my 1986-era stereo down there, with a cheap-ass CD linked to it, so I've been grabbing CDs to listen to.
However, I had the idea that if I'm doing this period story infused with the music culture of the period, I could write the whole thing to period vinyl. Of course, I don't own any period vinyl.
But there is a second hand record shop nearby. And so....
...I grabbed cheap stuff I knew relatively little about, plus a Captain Beefheart, as he's someone who I've always given relatively little time to. We'll see if this goes anywhere, or is just a passing fancy. I'm not an audiophile, but there's something ritualistic about Vinyl that has always worked for me. That it cuts you off from being a mayfly is a limitation but also a power. Plus, everyone says that desk workers should stand up every 20 minutes or so, and a side of vinyl basically means I'll be forced to do that to continue to get Powerful Bops.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
5.6.2024