299: less atomic
Hullo.
Third
Experimental
Links
Bye
This is a Thursday newsletter, as the Press release for this is just going out. Yup, it's the third printing for THE POWER FANTASY, which we've had to do before the second has even hit the shelves. Demand is, shall we say, fierce, but we're determined to make sure there's enough copies out there so anyone who wants to jump aboard, can. This is a rollercoaster, and if you're at all interested in following a monthly book, we will make it worth your while.
Oh – as well as a reprint, we saw the cover and thought “Man, that would look great with green foil” and figured “Why not?”. So there's a 1:10 green foil variant of the cover too. We're also delighted to show off some of the more radical design work Rian did, in terms of going to town with the On/Off power symbol and playing with the indicia. I'm really pleased with this one.
Here's the order codes for it for retailers who need it...
Cover A by Wijngaard – Lunar Code (0524IM936)
Cover B 1:10 copy incentive by Wijngaard foil – Lunar Code (0524IM937)
And there's all the rest of the various order codes in the press release..
Kat at Image asked us for a quote, and Caspar said...
Absolutely overwhelmed by the support the series has received just 1 issue in and we're only getting started. Thank you so much
And I said...
The response to the book has been everything we could have hoped for and more. The only thing more powerful than our cast is the resilience of our printers, desperately trying to make enough copies to meet demand. We hail them and their noble battle. They are the true heroes.
Because I am bad at dealing with things going well.
Anyway – orders for the third printing are in on Monday (Sept 2nd), so move swiftly if you want one. It's out September 25th, the week after the second issue (the 2nd printing of 1 is out the week before).
While we're here WE CALLED THEM GIANTS is also on FOC on Monday, so you can speak to your retailer there too.
Also, The Manchurian (the first part of the Horizon Experiment) is FOCing on monday, so order that too.
This is me trying to segue to the next section...
Here's something extra for you. I want to run extra content in the Power Fantasy (for more on this, see my outro letter at the end of the newsletter) and decided to hit up Pornsak Pichetshote and see if he was up for being interviewed about The Horizon Experiment – the project he's curated of five first issues of series from various creators, using their identities to warp the nature of their genre fiction in the way Pornsak's The Good Asian did. He was, and I used the interview to power the short profile piece... but it is only a short profile piece, and the interview is significant – both in size and content, and worth publishing in full.
What was the moment of germination for this? You've done amazing work with taking genre and placing a different protagonist at its centre, and making that perspective shift central to what the story is. When did you realize you wanted to curate a stage for other people to perform a similar feat?
I was so grateful for the response THE GOOD ASIAN got, and one of the things readers kept saying they wished there was more stuff like this. And I realized, so did I. But there was only so much I could do as a solitary writer working off my own experiences. But I knew other writers who were dying to do more in comics but weren’t getting that opportunity. And as a former editor, I thought I knew how to put enough things together to at least jumpstart the telling of those stories.
So I made them a challenge. Let’s do a series of one-shots that are pilots for future series, depending on how the one-shots sell. Let’s launch them all together because a rising tide lifts all ships. The link to all of them is that they all star protagonists of color and were set in popular genres where, as you say, that perspective shift is central to what the story is. The results are:
• THE MANCHURIAN by myself and Terry Dodson – about a Hapa (half Chinese-half Caucasian) James Bond running covert missions for China
• THE SACRED DAMNED by Sabir Pirzada and Michael Walsh – about a Muslim John Constantine
• MOON DOGS by Tananarive Due and Kelsey Ramsay – about East African werewolves in Miami, exploring being a minority within a minority
• MOTHERF*CKING MONSTERS by J. Holtham & Michael Lee Harris – An Evil Dead for black nerds
• FINDERS / KEEPERS by Vita Ayala & Skylar Patridge – about a reverse Indiana Jones who steals from museums to bring artifacts back to their native cultures.
You've selected established creators with strong bodies of work. They're the sort of people who I'd be hoping to see Image books from. You call it an experiment, but the thing which strikes me is that it's not an experiment - an experiment has a good chance of failing. You've picked people who I think will nail this. It feels more of an exhibition of talent, a statement of Look How Good These People Are, How Can You Say No? What was your thinking behind who to approach?
First of all, thank you. I feel the same way about the line-up. And it was honestly pretty simple to figure out who to go to. When I approached them, Sabir, J., and Tananarive were all friends and accomplished writers who wanted to write comics but had a hard time breaking in -- which I found crazy. Now, this project took so long to pull together, they’ve now all since started doing work for Marvel and DC, but they were still hungry for the chance to do something creator-owned, where their distinct voices could really shine.
Vita, of course, was someone who was already highly sought after in comics, but they’re the kind of writer that made me miss editing. So I thought, well, Vita’s been doing company-owned characters for a while, maybe I can lure them back to doing creator-owned work and selfishly get to work with them as well, because why can’t this be extra fun for me too?
Of course, we know why this is an experiment. It's not an artistic one (though obviously all art is experiment, to some degree) but a commercial one. Here's a way to try things out and see if they sprout. I think of this and I'm actually partially sad that it's necessary, but also struck at the power of it - grouping together to present this vision of books that are simultaneously at the core of what image mostly does (elevated genre comics) but different in an absolutely fundamental way.
**Want to talk about the arranging of the teams of the book in a wider sense? How did art teams form?
**
It all started from what our writers wanted, and we luckily got our top choices. When I conceived of The Manchurian, I knew I ideally wanted a Terry Dodson-type, when my co-editor on THE HORIZON EXPERIMENT Will Dennis basically said, well, why don’t we just ask Terry?
For The Sacred Damned, Sabir wanted the best horror comics artist we could find, so why not start with Michael Walsh, the best contemporary horror cartoonist currently working, as evident on The Silver Coin and Universal Studios’ Frankenstein?
Tananarive was really excited about working with a black female artist, since there’s a black heroine at the center of Moon Dogs, and Kelsey Ramsay is a superstar on the rise who managed to juggle this alongside her other non-stop commitments. Jose Villarrubia is practically a coloring institution, and his art is the exact kind he loves to color.
Will brought Michael Lee Harris in for Motherf*cking Monsters. J. knew it would be easy for an artist to fall into caricature traps when drawing black characters in the style he wanted, so he knew we needed a black artist to guard against that.
And Vita had wanted to do something creator-owned with Skylar Patridge for so long, it was a very easy yes when her name came up. Skylar brought on her longtime colorist Jason Wordie to color her. From there, my go-to letterer / designer Jeff Powell lettered two books, while Michael Walsh brought Becca Carey on board to letter the other two. And I have to say none of this would be possible without my good friend, editor Will Dennis, who’s one of the best editors in the business and co-editing this all with me.
We were talking about mutual support in e-mail earlier. Do you want to talk about how you feel about creators helping creators? Choice? Duty? What?
It’s choice and duty, but increasingly, I think it’s becoming existential. On a practical sales level, there’s strength in numbers during this time when all media – social and traditional – is so fragmented.
But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and this is my first time putting my thoughts down so cut all of this if I’m being grossly self-indulgent: We went through the social isolation of the pandemic before returning to seeing each other in person again. But nevertheless, the pandemic opened up this Pandora’s box by giving us the option of isolation on an unprecedented global scale. In a world where I’ve proven I can do everything from home, how do I measure what interactions are worth human contact? What amount of inconvenience is over my threshold? We’re all simultaneously re-evaluating that, and I think we’re starting to feel its cultural ramifications. It’s made it easier for corporations to treat workers more disposably, leading to this feeling of anonymity and a sense our social structures are letting us down. It’s led to the rise of hyper-partisanship based on increasingly isolated people being fed misinformation that was easier to debunk when different groups interacted more. So I think there’s this hunger to feel we can each connect with each other without having to sacrifice our individuality.
Creators helping creators is the tip of a much more significant iceberg, of us intuitively feeling this solitary road we’re on doesn’t go very far or lead anywhere we’d like. Creators helping creators in the grand scheme of things is a very small gesture, but it’s done in the hope that small gestures still matter. As I psychoanalyze myself, I think that’s really where THE HORIZON EXPERIMENT started.
But if you don’t mind, I’d love to turn that question back around to you. You’re doing an incredibly generous thing here offering 2 pages of Power Fantasy for creators to talk about their books, and I’m sure that comes with its own series of logistical inconveniences, but here you are, doing it anyway. Good God, man, why would you put yourself through that??
**Heh. I'm not derailing this with my brain download. I'll include something later in the newsletter. What's your hopes for this series? What does winning look like?
**
There’s a couple stages of winning to me. The most obvious is for all 5 one-shots to graduate to follow-up mini-series that graduate to ongoings depending on the creative teams’ schedules.
But more than that, if this ends up working, I hope other people iterate off the idea. There’s nothing proprietary about a group of friends coming together to bring attention to each other’s work – again, like what you’re doing in this interview. Just because the bigger systems aren’t set up to do it doesn’t mean we all can’t… just decide to. To work together to put out the books we want to see, that we know there’s an audience for.
I’m also glad to do it at Image – perhaps the only place this could have been possible – because it follows the tradition at its heart of what built Image Comics: Those original group of creators at the apex of their careers who turned their backs on superstar sales to bet on themselves – to just decide to make a paradigm that treated them better – and in the process, made the comics industry better for a generation of creators and fans.
The Manchurian is out in September, and is at FOC this monday (Sept 2nd). The rest of the Horizon Experiment will come out monthly, from Image Comics
The second volume of Brigantia is kickstartering at the moment, collecting issues 4-6 of the strong British small-press comic. Have a look – it's a beautifully drawn, timely story about the Matter of Britain essentially working as a more grounded pagan approach to the wonder woman archetype. If you don't know Chris Mole from his other works, you'll recognise him as the man behind The Secrets Of The Majestic anthology about the famous con toilet in Harrogate. I don't know artist Alaire Racicot at all, but she does some wonderful atmospheric manga-influenced work here, and I think it's worth at least a nose by you lot. Also, I'll be writing the introduction to it, so I need to work out something clever to say.
Kelly Sue and David Lopez are in the process of hyping their FML from Dark Horse, and have dropped their entirely bespoke How To Pre-order comic which makes my one look very much like amateur hour. I couldn't more excited by this. Also, do check out the site the comic is on – I'm really interested in what Bindings is doing, and have some plans for things there myself when I have spare time (i.e. possibly never).
This made me smile. Tom Ewing is writing about 2000AD at length, through the filter of concentrating an essay on each ongoing story in that first burst, putting it in cultural context and building from there. He introduces the concept here, and the first two essays on Dan Dare and Invasion! are already up.
Caspar did an AMA about everything (Including the Power Fantasy) over at League of Comic Geeks. Go and nose at what folks asked and what he said.
IGN's reporting on a prominent game accessibility advocate who seems to have never actually existed is a lot. This is hugely upsetting stuff.
Designer Megeuy Baker is co-designer of Apocalypse World, which begat all the whole Powered By the Apocalypse lineage, currently has breast cancer. There's a DriveThru bundle of excellent RPGs both by her and others - to support her treatment, and is worth your time and money.
I read the sixth Wyrd Science from cover to cover. It's really my favourite magazine of gaming existent, and you should get a copy.
As this week has been short due to the bank holiday, let's just answer Pornsak's question.
Coming back to Creator Owned comics has had me thinking a bunch, as anyone does who's working in the space. The total collapse of social media has made everyone rethink this. You can see Kelly Sue and David doing it up-newsletter. Hell, even if you have a big online following it's hard. Links being penalised when they point outside a closed ecosystem means that even if you're making the devil's bargain to (say) be on twitter, the devil's getting the best of the bargain, as the devil tends to do.
I was chatting to Eric about the state of play, and he noticed that there's been a trend of people running less house-ads. Hell, even less house-ads for their own stuff. I see that, and recognise it – especially with Image, my urge has always been to create this bespoke miniature 32 page universe, a pure little art object, crammed with as much stuff as possible.
That's got strengths obviously, but does carry a subtext: namely, this stands alone. There's us and everyone else. Artistic isolationism. That's not quite true – I'm aware that my books are always in conversation in other ways, especially outside the book, but in the actual books, at best its in the details or even subtextual.
But it also got me thinking of ways to square the two desires – house ads can be fun, but they're regularly just... there. How about something a bit fancier? Like, when writing DIE, I interviewed a bunch of game people – which were designed to illuminate the topic at hand, but also worked as a way to point people towards people whose work we liked.
I thought... why not try to do that a little in the Power Fantasy? Instead of just running a house-ad, run a short article to highlight another book (or possibly books). I'm a recovering critic and journalist. These are skills I have. These are skills I can use.
I then took the idea a bit further – why just run it ourselves? Why not just offer the finished pages to other creators at image and see if they have space to run it too? Treat it like a house-ad, shared content for whoever wants it. I believe most creators want to help their peers, but half the problem is the cognitive load. If you provide an easy solution, it removes one problem, and have an article which is of more added value to your readers than just a classic house ad. We also provided the raw copy and art assets, in case anyone wanted to re-design it for their own book.
I was a bit slow in getting it out to people, due to my travel, but a bunch of folks still have taken up the offer, so expect to see the actual article pop up in books in September and maybe October.
This was fun to do, hopefully will be fun for you all, and I hope I'll do something again in future. Perhaps another interview, maybe not. I don't know. The idea is there now, and I'll try and do something.
(Also: how did you feel about the interview in the newsletter? Is this something you like? This isn't the biggest newsletter in the world, but it's still thousands of people, and perhaps worth doing this sort of thing for? Feedback appreciated.)
So return to Pornsak – why do it?
I think we have to rebuild community, outside of the control of tech corporations who essentially fund building arcologies in the desert, and then start cutting services when people have built their lives there. This means just doing it, and seeing what you can do, yourself. What skills do you have? What is easy for you to do which is hard for other people to do? What would add to a whole? Because no single thing anyone does will be enough, but putting them all together, and you've got something. You want an example? The first time I mentioned this thinking to Chip, he started the thinking which led to the Zine that is Zdarsky Comic News. An old, simple, human connective idea which servces a purpose and is just fun. Look at what Rosenberg and his crew do with Ideas Don't Bleed.
Some of these are old ideas, brought back. The revival of the newsletter in the last five years as a form is a good example of that. Some, as Chip's zine shows, are even pre-internet ideas.
C was talking to me about someone who works in the local community in London – that with the collapse of social media, it's hard to get word out about local events, because everyone has forgotten how to look at the physical notice boards, even in places they go. People assume social media will tell them, and social media no longer will. It is no longer even pretending to be on your side.
I recognised that, and that's what we have to do, as a community, to be a community. We have to learn to look at noticeboards again. Hell, we have to learn how to put up noticeboards.
(I think it's one reason why I've been so pro classic direct market comic shops recently – in that they are an existing place, outside of corporate terrain, which runs off community.)
So, basically, Pornsak, I realised I could do it, which meant probably should do it. I thought it would be work, but not a huge amount of work, and it's work I know. I figured it could be fun, and even though it's a small thing, it's still a thing, and doing anything feels better than doing nothing.
I'd urge folks to do the same – not literally the same, but in terms of doing what they think is useful and fun and brings people together. It could be anything. For all me being down on Social media above “talking about stuff you love” absolutely is part of it.
I'm also aware there's an irony a book about Atomics is in part about me trying to be less atomic in my thinking.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
29.9.2024