315: if you start with wizard, you can't add wizard
Hullo
More Magpies?
Are We Out Of The Woods Yet? No.
Smoke Machines
Maps
Links
Bye
Stephanie was doing a thirty days of covers on Instagram, which was a lot of fun, looking across her work. On the last day, she posted this.
And also a “😘”
Looks neat, whatever it is.
The Solicits for March are out, and The Power Fantasy reaches issue #7. Here's the solicit...
1989: a popular year with Taylor Swift fans. In The Power Fantasy, we have a different Queen, and she nearly killed us all. We finally reveal the horror of the Second Summer of Love."
I joked when it dropped, that many writers get asked if they write their own solicits. That rarely happens to me, for some reason.
(The actual answer is “it varies. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.” With Creator Owned stuff, it's normally me. On my books. Not all books. I like supporting my fraternity, but that's a bit too much)
The alt this time is by the lovely Khary Randolph.
Anyway – out March 19th. Speak to your retailer about it, and issue 6. With the trade dropping shortly, it's a good time to start following monthly. Though honestly, any time is a good time to start following monthly, really.
There should be quite a bit The Power Fantasy stuff happening from now to the release of the trade and the start of the new arc. We're thinking about teasers for issue 6, and useful resources to get out there to support the trade's launch.
One thing which is worth mentioning in advance is that due to the trade being very much cut to the core story, we wanted to do some supplementary material available online. Basically, I'm rebooting my old comic podcast Decompressed to interview every member of the Power Fantasy team about the craft and challenge of doing it – Caspar, Clayton, Katie, Rian and myself. I'll have to find someone to interview me, unless I want to really turn it into performance art, which I probably do, as I'm like that.
Decompressed has been around, on and off, for a long time, so there's a back log of craft based conversation if you're into it. Folks regularly talk to me about it, and how useful it was, so if you're at all craft-minded or comics-aspiring, there's a bunch already there for you to nose through, and if you subscribe, you'll have the episodes as soon as I release them. Which will be (er) I'll work that out eventually. Probably Jan 29th, and weekly from then on.
I mentioned we're doing a launch party at GOSH in London last time on February 12th (Or, as we call it, Valentina's Day). I didn't link to their order page, as they have a bookplate edition you can buy.
Old Men Running The World's launch went well, and Jim and I are busying away writing stuff and editing what we've already got. I posted something from the DIE Beta, reworked to a modern form.
Gates, Chests, Keys & More: The Elements of the Adventure is me trying to write a structural framework for folks trying to create adventures. What is an adventure made of?
Well...
Gates
Chests
Keys
Signposts
Smoke Machines
Menus
...And you can read the rest here. It's written to explain RPG structure from scratch for new people, but I hope it's entertaining for anyone. It's got some dissing of Tolkien songs, which normally goes down well.
The funniest thing about the launch was us planning to have the comments off, and thought we'd set it as such, but then folks started commenting, and we discovered that you basically have to set comments to “off” on every single post. We're clealry never going to remember to do that, so I guess we have comments now?
We tried raging against the machine, but it turns out what you actually need to do is program against the machine.
Prompted by me thinking about my big formative non-comics influences, I've spent the holidays reading Le Guin's Earthsea. I've done the first three (which I've read) and have the latter three to go (which I haven't, which is obviously exciting).
But reading them, and the essays around it, got me thinking about Worldbuilding.
It's a well masticated topic, and the debate goes back and forth among fantasy writers. If I was to paraphrase the basic current position, it would be: Mainstream fantasy loves it, the Cool Kids are anti. I think that's actually been the basic position for my entire life, and a little more. The Cool Kids basically start with the New Wave.
Anyway – Le Guin's work are full of mystery and she evokes expertly, so when I read Atuan and hit this bit in her outro, looking back at the Wizard of Earthsea...
So when I wrote the last words of the book—“… before ever he sailed the Dragons’ Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world”—what was in my mind was not a teaser for a sequel, but only a resounding, echoing closure to a story told
… I wasn't surprised. She's writing evocatively, creating spaces where your reader explores and creates wonder on their own. It's a powerful move in fantastical fiction, in the broadest sense. It's Grant Morrison's go-to move. It's what makes the first Star War movie sing, showing aliens and lingering on them enough to make you know they're as real as anyone which Tegan O'Neil touches on here. You don't need to know the answers – you can evoke and create spaces for magic to happen inside spaces.
However, as the fact she wrote the Tombs of Atuan shows, if you throw questions out to the universe, eventually you decide you actually do have an answer for them.
So, you read that bit, and you can file Le Guin as anti-worldbuilding.
But then I read about how she first concieved of Earthsea.
...when I began to conceive that first book of Earthsea, I realized those islands belonged to a great archipelago, a world of islands, and I drew the map. All the islands were on it, but I knew nothing of them except their names, their shapes, the bays and mountains and rivers I had marked, the names of cities on some of them. They all remained to be discovered, one by one.
“Drawing a map” is about as core world-buildy as it gets. At some of my most Cool Kids periods I'd say that I'd just put a book down if it starts with a map. But Earthsea starts with a map, both for the reader and the writer.
I think the key thing to think about here is what this bit of formative World Building did.
The first first, functional thing – a lot of Earthsea is about the relationship between individuals in space and travel. Even Atuan, which is almost completely set in a single small temple in a single island, is shaped by the physical relationship between these places.
Earthsea is a story about a world that is a bunch of islands and treating the physicality (and the 2nd level effects born of that).
So, yes, she needed the map.
The second thing, and I suspect the more important thing as her “They all remain to be discovered, one by one” shows. It's a larger version of her writing about Dragonlords and The Tombs of Atuan and all the rest without knowing what Dragonlords and The Tombs Of Atuan were. These are evocative questions. In the same way a reader looks ta the map and wonder what the Dragon Reaches are all about, she is too.
She makes one thing solid (its geography) to create the questions she delights in answering. But, perhaps most interestingly, it also limits them. This island is just there now. I'm going to take that as a truth, and shape my further truths around it.
The thing I take away from this is how it illustrates a pure dogmatic Worldbuilding vs No Worldbuilding may lead you astray. The point of this is to decide what your story actually needs, and then do exactly that. To talk personally for a second, DIE hasn't a detailed physical map yet – it has a map of regions of power, and their location to one another, as DIE is a book about a world-as-critical argument. It's not that story. It's this story.
In short: make whatever kind of map you need, and then set sail.
It must be the season for Podcast rebooting – Image's Jim Viscardi has brought back his Let's Talk Comics to talk to Image creators. The first one is with Rick Remender. Here's it on Spotify and here it is on Apple.
The Til Death Do We Heart actual play reaches the penultimate episode 9, which was one of my favourite sessions, and certainly has the biggest “oh, yeah, Kieron is GMing this” moment.
This short video on the work of the ]Brink Literacy Project is a good overview of the work they do. I believe the story described here is in the next issue of F(r)iction, which I've also done a short comic for. I'll post about that when it's out.
I've been thinking about Jay Dragon's work a bunch. Here's a big Rascal interview about Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast from last year which is a good overview. I need to get a copy.
Jude Doyle writes about TERFS, Transmascs and “Two Steve Feminism” which is both detailed and strong.
Tom Brevoort's newsletter includes his writers guidelines. This is the core stuff which is hammered into Marvel Writers in his office, and (even if not in these exact words) elsewhere. This is basically what counts as house style. There's certainly some which I tend to dial down in my Creator Owned work, but they're always a good filter to consider the work through.
Sophie Smith at the London Review of Books writes on Pelicot case, expanding outwards into her own experience. It's a lot. I'm aware I've linked to things related to this a lot, which speaks to how much I've struggled to say anything useful about it and point to folks who are finding ways to do so. It is the sort of case one can't move past. It should knock down any comfy illusions about the world one finds themselves in.
Aditya writes about Ice-Cream #18, its presentation of dementia and watching members of their family disappear before death.. The issue is great, as is this.
The first week back at work, and I'm both energised and a little bewildered. I'm writing most of this on Tuesday, as I still feel I'm trying to triangulate how best to attack this. I have a week's space before I want to start on the next The Power Fantasy #8, and am using it. I don't need the next script for Stephanie until the end of the month. So basically I have 2 weeks clear in the calendar and trying to see what I can get done.
But it's useful, fundamental stuff. First thing I did yesterday was find the brain to work out the schedule for the new Stephanie thing, which actually lets us choose some real, fundamental tactics, and let us decide the shape of the year. It definitely means nothing new until the back end.
Bar a couple of short stories, the only comic I've got out in the period is The Power Fantasy. I'm aware I perhaps don't stress that enough, but any retailers reading this should be reminded. Folks like my stuff? This is all there is.
It's also nice having some space – that I got the LeGuin thoughts up-newsletter is telling, right? This afternoon is actually playing with tech to see if it does what I do, which will continue across the month. The extra time is very much about this kind of thing. I have an idea for some stuff on Bindings to get going. Plus the TPF hyping – I talk a bit about that upthread, but they'll be a lot of drums to beat.
Did I say orders are very good on the trade? They are.
But yeah. Space. I actually played a boardgame last night, and an exceedingly nerdy one. It involves flicking through grimoires. Just look at it.
I mean, consider this token...
“Voltaric Shield On”
That's self-parodically geeky. When Jim and I were playing, C came in and thought we looked cute, a heartwarming scene of old men acting like children.
This did get me thinking, in a casual way, of if I were to do a comic about Mage Wars, what would I do? And I realised I'd basically do the back-stage drama and emotions of these gladatorial wizards, and never show the actual fights. Which made me have a moment of insight into my process. I often note that I start with the desire to do human scale stories of real human emotion, and then whenever I have one of these ideas, after about 5 seconds, I think “How about a wizard?” This Mage Wars thought experiment made me realise a way around that particular bit of brain-failure is that if you start with wizard, you can't add wizard. You remove wizard.
You must create your own system, to paraphrase Blake, and my system is a distinctly shonky homebrew.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
8.1.2025