298: verdant green, verticality and goats
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We Called Them Giants is approaching its FOC on September 2nd, so your comic shop would love to get your order before then. It's also available from all the book shops, online and off. It's out at the end of October in comic shops, and early November in book shops. Kirkus' review is here, which talks about the books appeal in a gentle, non-spoilery way.
This is a short, stand alone graphic novel, that Stephanie and I wanted to do as a gap between larger projects. I'm really proud of it – Stephanie only gets better, and it feels like a magical little book that someone will find in a library and fall for, which was absolutely my goal. It's also the first book I've written which actually falls properly under the umbrella of “Young Adult”. All my image books have been rated Mature, and this is in a slightly different place. I’ve been saying I likely would do something YA inevitably since Journey Into Mystery, and here we are. It'd be a fun gift for someone, I suspect.
Image's new press-release is here, and they've released a preview drawn from the early part of the issue, which gives a taste of it.. Actually, here you go...
Seriously, hail Stephanie. She's done wonders here, and I can't wait for you to see it all. Here's my advance copy...
And there's a little video of me flicking through and talking about it over on Instagram.
The Power Fantasy 2 is at FOC next Monday (26th) and will be out September 18th. With the issue being late to a bunch of retailers, we decided to give it an extra week so they'd have a chance to see demand. Do talk to your retailer, if you get a chance. The first issue sold out before it was out. Letting your retailer know you want one is the only way you can be sure to get one, which is the sort of annoying tautology that comics forces you to write.
(The reprint for issue 1 will be out the week before issue 2 drops, so you can jump right aboard.)
I'll save the full preview of it until nearer the time, but as a tease, here's a cut-down version of the intro page, where we actually lay out the specific terminology we've been using naturally in the first book, so if you’re wondering exactly what the difference between “Atomics” and “Nuclear Family” is, now you’ll know.
We're really happy with issue 2. Issue 1 is a machine that goes for the throat. Issue 2 loosens up and shows what we're like when we're not playing an opening track, and has its own rhythms, while still hitting like a truck when it wants to. I'm especially happy with what Caspar did with Masumi's scenes. Here's some panels he posted...
Oh – and Image posted a teaser for the issue too.
Coo.
The updated tweaked DIE RPG PDF is available to download. If you backed the Kickstarter, just log into your backerkit (following the link in an e-mail is easiest) and download it.
It's mainly typo fixes and minor things, but the “how to read this manual” bit has been overhauled pretty aggressively to more firmly guide you to the best way to learn the game. Which is mainly “It's arranged for ease of reference. Don't read it straight though. It's not a bloody novel.”
As you can imagine, there's been a lot of The Power Fantasy chat since we last talked. Reviews are off the chart. League of Comic Geeks – probably the biggest place of comic discussion right now – has 97% of the 365 people who rated it liking it. Seeing folks enthuse about it all over Social Media is great to see.
I mean that both for our joy in sharing art, and also through basic practicality. Word of Mouth is basically what any independent artistic project lives off. In short: Everyone knows who the X-men are, but chance are the only reason someone knows The Power Fantasy is because you told them We love to see it.
We're also heading into the second set of interviews, post-release, which is interesting. The Comicon interview has gone live, and I think it’s a really good one. I often find myself when talking about what I've done, and it's delineating a lot of my thinking. As I say in the answer I'm going to quote, it's a chance to reverse analyse the muse.
MacNamee: Your last collab with Winjgard was on Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt (2029). A far more formalist and more directly comparable series to Watchmen. Of course, this will also lead folks to draw comparisons, but this is a very different story, stylistically and narratively. I assume you will embrace – nay, dare I say it, be prepared for – these comparisons?
Gillen: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a very different book in lots of ways – Peter Cannon was basically a critical essay in the form of a superhero comic, and often written in the mode it was critiquing. This just isn’t that – this is us telling a story. A story with heavy themes, and a story I’m sure people will be writing big essays on – but fundamentally, a story. What I think we’re most expecting is people noting that PC:T arguing we should move past Watchmen, and The Power Fantasy has a lot of Watchmen in the DNA. So what’s that about then?
Were I to defend ourselves – and I guess I am, as I’m writing this paragraph – I’d say that’d be flattening what PC:T was saying. It was never about Watchmen being bad. It was about a monomanical attempt to repeat Watchmen’s card trick rather than learn its lessons had created firm limitations, and there’s many ways to progress, other texts than Watchmen to take from. What the Power Fantasy takes from Watchmen is things which barely anyone has done – for a start, it’s trying to do a novel with superheroes, with all that intellectual ambition. Watchmen is often talked about through a deconstructionary and formalist filter – but folks don’t talk about how it works as a creature of character. There’s a reason why it sells so much to people who’ve never read comics (and so won’t know the deconstruction bits).
Plus there’s also the other side – we use none of Watchmen’s tricks formally. This isn’t me doing an Alan Moore script. While Caspar and I are really tight and talk constantly, I also am not asking for roughs. We re-draw if it’s off, but Caspar is absolutely exploring what the story can look like. It’s not a writer first project. It’s very much this jamming book, and as I’m taking less of the formalism means I can spend more time on the depth of the timeline and all the novelistic aspects. It’s a book that aspires to be as good as Watchmen, but doesn’t aspire to be as good as Watchmen by being like Watchmen. That’s impossible, for a start. Being really good is in part about showing stuff folks haven’t seen before.
But I say all that, and it’s mainly me reverse analysing the muse. I found myself with a story I wanted to tell, and this is it. You can’t overthink it. The heart wants what the heart wants.
And you can read the rest here.
As I was hyping the first issue of The Power Fantasy, I've kept quiet on the solicits for the next ones. However, as well as issue 2's FOC being next week, the solicits for October and November are now available to read.
But I'm just going to post the covers. Paulina Ganucheau joins us on issue 3, and Chip jumps in on issue 4. Both have a 1:50 florescent design variant for Rian. Hmm... wait. I remember writing CHECK OUT THAT COW! about Caspar's issue 3, so maybe I've posted that already. If only there was a way for me to check was in previous newsletters.
Actually, I did get my copies of Rian's design variant, so I'll show a picture of them. You really don't get a sense of how the florescent ink hits until you see it in the flesh. The example ones we show in previews really don't show how they work.
There's also a video over in my Instagram if you like the flyby vibes.
Comrade Rossignol writes at length about when I ran Feng Shui for him and a bunch of games journos in the early 00s. He talks about how it absolutely rewrote his brain on what is possible in an RPG. Conversely, I had forgot about the game until he told me about it. That's delightful – I know there's moments in time folks have done something which was profound and transformative for me, and they likely don't remember at all. This is kind of what sharing art does, at its best – show a portal into another way of thinking and being, and gives you permission. This is pretty good going for a write-up which is mainly about renegade cops going “I don't care!”.
The always-good Dan Watters' new newsletter is good value. He wrote about the Power Fantasy here - and it's always gratifying when a peer actually writes seriously about something you're doing – [but his latest one had a moment which really struck me(https://thedeadairchannel.ghost.io/thedeadairchannel002/)). He's talking about reading Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker's Sad Planets with its Spinoza, David Bowie an d Kant, and then in the next section talks about him writing shiny bald icon Destro. Just by being GI joe rather than the usual superheroes this gives me a moment of hilarious perspective. That's what being a WFH comic writer is like – you have a head full of Bowie and you're channelling that through the medium of a metallic-masked arms dealer. Comics! There's nothing quite like it.
Via Wyrd Science, I discovered this site going through both decks of the Iconic Top Trumps horror decks. If you're someone of a certain age and a certain aesthetic, this is absolutely full-body memory stuff. I mean, look at Death. And what the fuck was going on with Thor? I now want to do an ultra-lo-fi comic with this vibe. Or an RPG. Honestly, this would work great for folks who thing Mork Borg is a bit too slick.
Chip and Fraction have a humblebundle sale at the moment!. If you haven't got their stuff, get it.
Iris was up at 5 today, so this likely will be shorter and less coherent than I was hoping for. I have had thoughts but you need to be able to think to best express that.
I've been travelling for three weeks, and have arrived back to the work shed on Monday. You may imagine what my To-do list is like. In fact, you'd have to imagine it. My To-do list doesn't exist. I am fighting the biggest, most necessary fires, and assume that all the mails I haven't got to yet aren't immediately pressing, because no-one's screaming at me.
As much as it wasn't easy, travel was a whole lot of great stuff.
First week was Gencon, where I'm still something of an outsider. As Game Daddy Grant enjoys teasingly introduces me, I'm Celebrity Guest Kieron Gillen. I don't have a lot of demands on my time, and so I have a lot of down time and rarely even have specific plans for dinners until I'm eating (by comparison: a comic con basically has every space filled). This is lucky, as I had significant amount of work to do (not least finish a Power Fantasy Script) but still gives it an unusual rhythm. I was primarily there to run DIE games – D36, the 36 player version of DIE and the live panel game. All of them sung – the second D36 game made me make a few notes about how to improve it if we ever run it again (and I have an idea for a different megagame DIE) and the panel game (which I previously ran at Tbubz) was just as hilarious.
Oh – I also got DIE RPG's Origins award!
Which is now gone forever, as it was in my luggage that was stolen when I arrived back in the UK.
London was basically 2 days – in on Tuesday, a Power Fantasy launch signing on Wednesday, and then travelling again on Thursday. Here's the signing, courtesy of Rian
It was good to see everyone who came – and signing with Rian is fun, in that you get to see basically 30 years of design work turning up, including things he clearly hadn't thought about in decades. I especially smiled at the Invisibles covers – issue 1, with the floro. "Do you like Floro, then, Rian?" I think the highlight was just spen ing some quality time with Caspar. We've lived in each others' Whatsapp all year, but to crash out back at my house and just take on the shape of the world on a human level was absolutely rejuvenatory.
Then off on the train, up to Glasgow for Worldcon – another place where I'd think I would be a bit of an outsider (comics are a little exotic there) but in fact, felt absolutely like home turf in a quirky way - i've enough friends on the scene now that if I just walk, I'll see someone I know. My own schedule – between the panels I was on and work I had to do – was so intense that I wasn't able actually watch any panels until Sunday afternoon. My panels were all great, but a special call out to the Panel Bleed live-DIE 1panel. Its been amazing every time I've ran it, but this one was perhaps the best ever. Adrian Tchaikovsky as evil publisher, Amal El-Mohtar as a sad designer and Emma Vicelli as a confused comic creator were wonderful. The rest? I saw so many people, ate meals with them and had a really great time – when I met Emma off the train the joy in my heart at seeing her was a moment I realised “Oh, man, I've missed seeing these lovely folks.”
(She had some amazing news recently – she's a finalist in the Stiles & Drewe song competition. As a RPG character, she is the ultimate multiclass)
Then straight from Glasgow to Turin, to head up the non-skiing bit of the alps to spend time with Chrissy's Italian family. Honestly, it's like being in Heidi up there – verdant green, verticality and goats. It was a break – and could hardly not be, as you're lucky to get 3G up there.
The downside was I caught a dose of Covid at Worldcon (which kind of surprised me – with the level of masking and size of crowds, I'd have presumed if I were to get it, I'd get it at Gencon. At Gencon I even ate opposite someone who was coughing the whole meal and tested positive for covid the next day, and I was untouched. I want to dig into some math/research on infection – there's part of my head which is thinking “Cons are actually worse for creators than normal con-goers, as we have more close interactions with people. In a signing queue with 100 people, if you sign, you just go face to face with me. I meet 100 people.” I digress.)
Luckily, I yet again was borderline asymptomatic, so we were able to work through the mountain trip with masks and distancing, and everyone seems to have avoided it. I actually tested clear yesterday too.
Anyway, that's what I did on my holidays.
(What I actually did on my holiday work wise? The Power Fantasy 4, which is Katie and Caspar's fave issue yet. Oh – have I said Katie West is now editor on The Power Fantasy? She is. She was working as a reader and a line editor on earlier stuff, but when I was travelling, I knew we needed to be full on. Getting back, I just wrote a little 5 year Work for Hire thing, for an anniversary issue. I probably should have said no, but it was fun to write the characters again. More on that down the line, obv.)
There has been something which has rewired me a little. I suspect I'm too tired to do justice to it entirely, but I've been reading Paul Morley's biography of Tony Wilson. I've had it on my reader for a while, but only got to it now, and I rapidly realised it was exactly the right time for it. Wilson's life is basically the period the Power Fantasy covers, so it's useful there. But it also let me realise a reason why I'm even doing the Power Fantasy, which I see by how Morley is taking apart Wilson's life, and the influences that went into it, and how he processed them to do what he did.
One of the biggest influences on Phonogram was Morley's 2003 gloriously weird history of pop music, Words And Music. 2003 me was 100% in Morley's world - I was a guy with a music journo brain applying it to videogames in my day job and life in my (er) life. Reading this, over twenty years later, is making me see how much the last 16 years working in the American comic industry has battered my thinking, up to the point where due to having to explain things in the lingua fraca of geekdom so often that I've forgotten exactly where the roots of my thinking actually were. All my “Stories are cigarettes and I'm the warning label” stuff, for example. I've fell into that as the “Stories are powerful and wonderful” people are such a big tradition in comics, and what I do is often adjacent and at least slightly antipathic to that, so have to delineate myself.
But reading about Wilson discovering the Situationists reminded me... Kieron, your suspicion of story isn't about comics, or even fiction. It never has been. It's from the Situationist tradition, coming from that counterculture that infused all those wanky music-journos. This wasn't even subtle:” you wrote an entire unpublished comic called Derive. The waters which Wilson and Morley swum are my waters, and it's been so long that I forgot that.
Which leads me back to the Power Fantasy – at least half the timeline is my formative life, so a desire to look more closely at what it was like to culturally come of age and form there really is in the mix. There's a line I just passed, which argues – I paraphrase – that one way to avoid nostalgia is to have the memories of someone else: as in, to radically reinterpret your own memories, to shake them free of the stories that you've built around them. If you're an active observer, the past is as alive as the present.
Anyway: all a welcome reminder, and something of a call to action. That I was just heading into comics when Morley showed me a road I wanted to follow and now, a couple of decades later, Morley reminds me where that specific road was coming from seems timely.
I still have 50% to read though. Maybe it turns into bobbins.
Speak soon
Kieron Gillen
London
21.8.2024