290: Jamie drew the living
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It's our ten year anniversary of WicDiv's launch today. To celebrate, we've just launched a Kickstarter for a Fancy Art Book of all the covers. It's live now. You can go and back, or stay here while I show and tell a bit.
Here's the tiers...
The Standard Edition - £40
We say “standard” but there's never really a standard with us. This is a fancy, hyper-oversized art book with beautiful production values, collecting all the WicDiv covers, plus making of material and an introduction. How big is it?
Coo!
As well as all the other extras, Jamie will draw a Sakhmet cover in the classic WicDiv headshot style. Due to the nature of publishing, she didn't get one originally, and it's bugged us ever since. This is our chance to undo the historic wrong, and we're grasping it. Finally, the complete set.
Standard Book plus Signed Bookplate - £50
Due to the shipping situation, we can't offered a tier where we actually sign the books. Instead, we're doing an exclusive bookplate for those who want to have our names attached to it.
Deluxe Edition including signed bookplater - £75
Want even fancier than our basal fancy? Want black cloth binding? You got it? Want a holographic foil all over the place? You got it? Gilded holographic pages? We got it too, and I don't even known what that means. Sewn Bindings? Yay! Also a black ribbon, because books with ribbon are the kind of opulence we demand for an event like being 10 years closer to death.
Giclée Art Print - £85 with Standard Edition and book plate, £100 with Deluxe Edition, both including bookplate
You're clearly a fan of fine art, being interested in a book of covers. Perhaps you'd be interested in an actual fancy print to go alongside with your purchase? This is a – and I quote - “305gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 100% Cotton Rag, pH neutral, Acid Free art paper” which sounds very fancy to me. They'll be individually signed and numbered by Jamie, and are limited to 200. This sounds great, especially the part where only Jamie has to sign them and I can just sit and have a little snooze.
That's the tiers. We wanted to keep this simple. Anything else?
Postage! It'll be paid afterwards, via Backerkit. These are estimated by our distributor, so may change, but they're...
USA: £4.50 ($5.74 USD)
UK/Europe: £4
Rest of world: £7
Which sounds pretty good, right?
We estimate that the books will be with folks by December 2024, so an ideal present for a loved one, or yourself, or perhaps someone who hates Wicdiv and who you want to upset.
Oh retailers who want to get copies? Reach out, and we'll sort you out personally. Details in the FAQ.
Back here, and spread the word. It's fun to be back, albeit briefly.
And to the Future.
The next of the cast of the Power fantasy has just been revealed over at AIPT, including some new pages and assets, plus a few quotes from Caspar and I. Go nose over there, but here's most of what we said...
Meet Etienne Lux.
Etienne Lux is our telepath. Or, omnipath, as others have occasionally put it - he'll roll his eyes at that. Such ego would be the death of us all.
The Telepath and superpowered fiction has an interesting relationship, right? Telepaths are the nearly-man of the genre. Siegel and Shuster's first Superman wasn't Clark Kent. It was a Bill Dunn, a vagrant man gifted telepathic powers by a scientist. He existed for one short story and came to a poor end, and they re-used the name a year later to make the guy we all know. I think it says a lot when Siegel and Shuster first thought of "Superman", they went to telepaths.
He was bald as well. And a jerk. What is it about bald telepaths who are jerks?
At least one reason I mailed you guys asking if you wanted to introduce Etienne is that you're a site that has an obvious real relationship with the X-men. And this did all emerge from my X-work. In the same way that the Wicked + the Divine came to me due to seeing the limitations of what I could do with Young Avengers, The Power Fantasy came from writing Immortal X-men, and seeing stories in the vague space that would never work in the Marvel Universe. I think that may be truest with Etienne. Of all the cast, I think Etienne is going to be the one who gets comparisons. He's a telepath and public intellectual who views himself as something of a spokesperson of his "people" - we call them the Atomics, or the Nuclear Family. It will be easy to make comparisons, and folk probably should.
The differences will become swiftly apparent.
It's not just because he has hair.
And Caspar says...
Etienne Lux has been a brilliant character to shape, he's incredibly cultured with a unconventional eye for fashion somewhat ahead of if its time. I Drew inspiration from various people both real and fictional that while designing his looks over the 40 year period we spend with him, this isn't a spandex and capes book, making sure Lux feels unique fell more into the little eccentricities. He exudes cool.
We didn't share the character designs for Etienne, as they'd send people down the wrong alley – they were putting him younger in a much later era, so it was him in the 1980s as a teen, which looked great, but isn't him. But that he's the second oldest of the cast does mean we really get to know him across time – it's him you saw with Valentina in the pages we showed when we revealed her.
Anyway – Etienne Lux. One sixth of The Power Fantasy's Superpowers, and perhaps the prime mover for a lot of our action.
Next week? Someone else, I'm sure.
Speak to your retailer in basically the next month.
- I don't plug my instagram much, do I? Mainly as it's mostly pictures of my miniatures and my face, and no-one wants to see either of them. I've started using it a bit more. For example, I've finally embraced doing stories today, and so have had to write “ELITE DISHTOWEL CONTENT!!!” to all the people messaging me. Really, go see. I will give you ELITE DISHTOWEL CONTENT!!!. Anyway – if you want to have silly regular visual updates, follow, and I'll try to give you fun stuff.
- Dicebreaker seems to be closing, after its mother company had been purchased by IGN. That's a real shame. Comrade Rossignol writes about the ways forward for the consumer press – which are lessons to be learned more generally. He's got a lot more angles, but a lot comes down to “back stuff you want to read” - the last fifteen years have basically been the internet's era of Bread and Circuses, where we've all been given free stuff which has been paid for by Venture Capital trying to capture our loyalty. It was never free.
- That said, I did say my conspiratorial writer brain did spit out “the reason why capital has pushed towards SEO-driven listicle writing on sites is because it's the type of writing that AI can actually replicate.” Which is obviously nonsense. It's just that none of these people care about what human contact actually is for. Er... this is the links section, so I should put a link in here. How about a link to Jim & Marsh's latest Teeth game, False Kingdom, where you play courtiers trying get one over on your crap King? I'm really enjoying the pair explore their aesthetic universe of historical fiction and total nonsense.
- Tini writes about her memories of Krakoa, and describes the time Leah brought a goat to the weekly Zoom. I think that was my first X meeting. I had no idea what was going on.
- The Technology Review writes about the fall of Gamification, and how what was described as a panacea ended up just being another set of chains (and was basically just behaviouralism with a joypad).
Yesterday, my internet went pop!
As such, today I'm launching a kickstarter, doing two podcasts, abstractly playing in an online game tonight and generally trying to herd cats, and I'm trying to do it all on 5G tethered from my poor little phone. This is not ideal. That said, since I started writing this newsletter, the engineer has turned up and ascertained the problem is outside the house, and he's head off to wander the streets of Lewisham, presumably to hit gremlins until they give me my Internet back.
It's the 10 year anniversary of WicDiv. I probably should write about it, but my brain rebels. There's a distance between how especially early WicDiv is viewed from the outside (a hugely successful, critically acclaimed and generational book which was significant part of many other people's own journeys) and how I view it (Hell). 2013-2015 is perhaps the worst period of my life, and I was imploding and barely hanging on throughout.
When talking about WicDiv to TV people, I tell them I would only interested in being involved at a distance. I could perhaps be closer in a pilot, but the idea of being tied to this thing which is made of bad memories for years again horrifies me. It was torture first time. Never again.
(Not that WicDiv is in development at the moment – we got the rights back, and we're talking to suitors again.)
Yet at the same time, it's undeniably exactly what I wanted to do, I'm ludicrously proud of it and what it means to people. I think this first year and change would have been better if my head wasn't on fire throughout, but that I was that vulnerable as I was certainly transferred some of that awful energy to Laura. Mostly, I'm just surprised that even then, I was able to look ahead and construct this over-intricate structure that led to where it did. Stuff changed and developed, but so much remained exactly as originally formulated. That I was capable of seeing a path from the start to that white page at the end amazes me a bit. And worries me, in the same way me finishing writing Young Avengers the day we buried my Dad does. But still – if I was in hell, I looked up, imagined the steps out, and started to construct them. Across 5 years we did, and we saved as much as we could.
This should be going out before six. 10 years ago, I'd have been on the way to Forbidden Planet, having had the one actual-barber-beard-cut of my life, wearing my McQueen. If it was around 5:50, I'd have been in the FP toilet, badly hurriedly applying eyeliner and daubing my nails silver and green. It turs out it's going out at 6:25 - we'll have been meeting people, writing our names, running on adrenaline. Afterwards, we jumped in a back of a taxi (with Felicia Day who was randomly in town) and drove to the Star of Kings, where we had our launch party. We played records, I said some awfully grim things about life over our mike, and our friends Summer Camp played a gig. It was a proper launch party, the sort which indie comics really just don't do, and I was in no state to enjoy it.
“Something special, which I was in no state to enjoy.” When I think of early WicDiv, that kind of sums it up.
But I also aware that the Steps Out Of Hell aspect of WicDiv was intended. It was meant as a healing ritual. It was me saying goodbye to who I had been, but also me trying to see who I could be next and whether that person could be better. I was in therapy for the whole time WicDiv was out, and more, but WicDiv also was therapy.
I'll never do anything like it ever again. I write that with both regret and relief.
Jamie, of course, drew this living shit out of it.
Kieron Gillen
London
18.6.2024