320: We're teenagers, not exorcists!
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“It”
“TPF”
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I finally got around to polishing my new indie RPG zine, How Do Aliens Do “It?”. It was actually written and proofed since October, but it's only now that I've found the time to do everything else to get it out there (mainly, learn how to use Affinity Publisher to lay it out).
It's about alien teenagers in a repressive, information-scarce society, gathering to share what each of them knows to try and work out how doing “it” works, and how they feel about that. It was inspired by... well, let's quote the designer notes from the book...
I was having lunch with a friend and fellow Gen-X-er. They were describing seeing a post from a younger Millennial who’s written something like "It was hard – we had no idea about how sex worked. The only information source we had was the internet.”
We all laugh: “WELL, ALL WE HAD WERE THOSE THREE LINES IN THE RAUNCHY BOOK IN THE LIBRARY, THE OCCASIONAL AGONY AUNT COLUMN, AND THE PORN WE FOUND IN THE WOODS.
This is a game about that, but thrown through a metaphor, using the Brindlewood Bay mystery mechanic (normally used for actual detective things) to make the group work out a different kind of mystery (How on earth do we do “it”?). It's a playful and often very funny game, but also approaches some big issues lightly. It starts about working out mechanical aspects, then grows to be about society and then into more underground elements. You tend to end up in societies where the species wings or magnetic fields are, in some way, considered queer. I don't really tend to make heartwarming cosy art much, but this is a rare exception.
It's Pay what you want, but really, do pay nothing and have a nose.
Here's an actual game we recorded, for those who want a taste. This was a lovely group, including Max Degan, who provided the art.
If watchng that is too much, the zine includes a 3 page example of play, which I think gets the vibe, while also including the phrase “We’re teenagers, not exorcists!”
This makes me really happy to be out there. It's been a long time since I've done a small but sizeable zine object, basically for art's sake.
Image Solicits for April have been out for a while, and in fact May is out!, including The Power Fantasy #8, which I don't think I've linked to yet, right? Anyway, here's the solicits.
The Power Fantasy #8
WRITER: Kieron Gillen
ARTIST / COVER A: Caspar Wijngaard
COVER B: Dani
APRIL 23 / 32 pages / FC/ / $3.99
Eliza Hellbound saved the world. When written like that, it sounds like a good thing. THE POWER FANTASY finally explores what makes the ultimate good girl gone bad tick-tick-tick.
More details on TPF can be found here.. Speak to your retailer and get aboard, innit?
We finish the Power Fantasy's interview series with Aditya interviewing me. Surprising no-one, this is long, but hopefully has a lot of things worth listening to. We talk about craft, process, community and all the good stuff. I may have said some things which are likely unwise, which is normally a good sign it’s fun.
The Power Fantasy interviews return with issue 7, which actually has two. I've missed the order cut off to reprint the whole thing here (it'll appear nearer release), but Matthew Rosenberg and Stefano Landini's We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us gets its orders finalised on Monday. I really loved this, and if you're interested, you should speak to your retailer about it. In a real way, it absolutely impacts what they order, which basically impacts everything. And also means you get a neat comic.
Anyway – while a feature will be the issue, here's the complete interview between me and Matt...
I listen to your podcast, Matt (And am amazed how every episode you manage to get a better guest - it's pretty startling). One of your go to theories is British writers tend to be idea first and American writers tend to be character first. "This is a story about a girl who, etc" Through that filter, how do you see We're Taking Everyone Down With Us?
I was wondering if I'd ever meet our listener. It's a pleasure.
As for our book, I guess the "character first" answer is that it's the story of a girl and her robot friend on a quest of self-discovery and revenge, and learning if those two things can coexist. The "idea first" answer is that it's about the moment in someone's life where they become an adult, whether by choice or by circumstance, and how that moment will shape every action and every relationship from that point on.
Really I tend to make books that help me try to answer questions I'm struggling with about my own life at the time. But what I'm finding is that spending a year or two focussing on finding answers tends to raise a lot more questions. The charitable view is that everything I make is in conversation with the previous work. The less charitable take is that I keep tackling the same ideas over and over. We'll see what the audience thinks I guess.
Actually, this hits one I'm curious about. When I was doing my own Decompressed back in the day, it was actually part of my process for preparing to do WicDiv. Listen to it again, you can see me basically trying to figure things out and using my peers as a sounding board even as I interviewed them. How does Ideas Don't Bleed impact your own process? Does it?
I think doing the podcast is the natural extension of reading my peer's work in hopes of improving my own craft. I'm trying to figure out approaches to writing and having a career in comics that do and don't make sense for me. In some ways I grew tired of the idea of studying writers I love to become a better writer myself. Pulling apart an Alan Moore script can only get you so far. I can't make my brain work like his, I can't make it do what his does, but I can train it to do a (pretty paltry) impression of him. And I see that a lot, and maybe am guilty of it sometimes, and it sucks. At a certain point we have to accept that writing comes from our own internal voice and trying to mold that into something else will always be disingenuous. So in part I turned from studying the work to studying the people themselves a bit. I am sure I'll get to the same place, that improving the work only comes from improving myself, but for now I'm having fun trying to figure out why people's brains make the stories they do.
It's a genre set up - daughter of a mad scientist! robots! Hunted by a superspy organisation! - but its presentation is almost entirely non-genre. Apart from the ironic fake-out opening, we're looking at these scenes and treating them in that more grounded mode. People's emotions are rawer. You downplay. The robots are shot in a quotidian mode. The book feels real. What's the goal?
It comes from me being fascinated by spy stories. I grew up on James Bond, Ethan Hunt, and Jason Bourne, where spies were just superhero proxies, and I still love them. But as I got older I discovered John le Carré, and Graham Greene, and Greg Rucka's Queen & Country. It felt like a revelation to make a spy story more grounded, more realistic, which is hilarious if you think about it. My entry point for the genre, like a lot of people's, is absurd. I knew I wanted to do a spy story, but one where I tried my version of blowing up the James Bond idea, which is going in the other direction. I wanted to take the grounded characters, the realistic emotions, and the normalcy of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Quiet American, but lay it over the most absurd parts of Moonraker. And once we started playing with that idea, I realized it can't really be about the spy. It has to be about the people whose lives he impacts. It's a fun world to explore because you arrive at these very real, very human problems but sometimes your solution is hidden lasers and evil clones.
It also is a really fucking funny book. Especially when the stuff with VEIL comes in, the book hits an ironic playful place. The "I guess I did..." sequence was, I suspect, when I solidly thought the book is going to do great and folks will love it in the "we love Hawkeye/Sex Criminals" way. How does one balance the tone? It's a book which hits the funny-yet-emotional indie film sort of aesthetic in comics, if you see what I mean.
To me, finding humor anywhere and everywhere is the most human trait. I've seen people in the darkest moments of their lives say the funniest shit. I've seen truly evil, awful people be hilarious. Humor is one of the most universal forms of communication we have. So I try to put a bit of humor in everything but it's the stories where I need real emotional connection with the characters or I need to go someplace really dark that I lean into it the most. Obviously you run the risk of cutting tension or stepping on raw moments, but I think if you're mostly honest with the emotions you know what you do and don't want to ruin with a dick joke.
Can we talk a bit about the team - it's a really striking coherent book. How does it? Titov's rocking some really interesting palette choices. There's bold moves from Hassan. And still - if I was told it was actually Landini doing it all, I wouldn't be surprised. It's strikingly coherent. How much was that the goal? How much is that the goal generally?
100%. I am really lucky to get to ride everyone's coattails on this one. I definitely don't feel like it all being coherent is always the goal. I always think of a creative team like a band. There are definitely books where it's fun to have people act like virtuoso talents, soloists, playing off each other. Charlie Parker and Miles Davis standing shoulder to shoulder, right? But I don't think that is where Stefano or I shine, or wouldn't be on this book at least. Sometimes you just need to understand the world needs Ramones as much as it needs Led Zeppelins. We work well in step with each other, and we wanted colors and letters and design to stand with us. Roman came in keeping the colors very flat to accentuate Stefano's clean lines, but making the pallette wild to add more depth. And Hassan is really one of those versatile talents who can play well with anyone. He saw what we were doing and he adds style and class to it, makes it playful when it needs to be but plays it straight just as much. It really is a joy to get to watch the team build everything.
Want to talk about the personal side of this? The emotions seem really to the front her. Without wallowing, it feels a book powered by these big emotions. Is it?
I talked a bit before about focussing on a theme until you suddenly discover you have more to say on it, and that is the case here, but there is another part of it. This is probably a good example of 'you can never stand in the same river twice' but when Tyler Boss and I started making What's The Furthest Place From Here? that was me coming to terms with the approaching death of a family member. The core idea for that book came from imagining a life without them. And it's something we're still exploring and reckoning with in that book (as I shamelessly whisper that volume 4 is out now), but now I'm on the other side of that loss. It's no longer theoretical and I get to look back and realize I was so fucking wrong about so many things. Well, maybe not wrong at the time, but I'm a different person standing in a different river. I've spent a long time telling this story about moving past the memories that haunt us and the pain of loss, and now I'm telling a story about how moving on scares the hell out of me and the absence of all that is the real loss.
You will definitely include the part where you said this book was funny, right? That feels like we should maybe put that in bold or increase the font size. Yes it's a book about death and loss, and finding out who your family is and who you are to them, and being forced to discover who you were meant to be and who you wish you were. But it's also about sad robots, and foul-mouthed children, and vampire apes, and we are trying to make you laugh, really. I promise.
We're Taking Everyone Down With Us #1 is out on 26th March, and if you want one, order before March 4th (i.e. Monday)
Now I'm embedded in the South West, I'm doing a signing with a bunch of folk at the relatively-newly-opened venue for Excelsior Comics in Bristol. Sunday March 16th, between 2 and 3pm, in Broadmead. I'm looking forward to this. For a city where I was living when I actually started doing comics, it's been a long time since I've done anything there.
The forthcoming comic app Sweetshop has just revealed Image will have its books available on launch. I had the app demoed to me this week. A DRM-free in-app-purchase system is the bare minimum, but what they showed is much more than that (think Steam/Letterbox-esque functionality). This would be a great thing if everything works out. Kenny Sweetshop was on the latest Off Panel, which has a lot of what's on his mind.
Artist and writer Emma Vicelli is, to be honest, a bit too talented. She won the Stiles & Drew and Mercury Muscial Development Best New Song prize in 2024, which has basically been a journey. However, she's released the demo recording of the song on Spotify, so you can actually listen now.. Content warning for intimate partner violence.
I've enjoyed watching Every Game I've Ever Completed write about every game he completed, but he's reached Bard's Tale, which was a huge deal for me – and I never completed. But I did throw down with 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers, 99 Berserkers and 99 Berserkers a lot.
I've written about El Sandifer's Last War in Albion before, which is a piece of criticism about the creative duel between Morrison and Moore in an extensive and elaborate style. As part of this, she needed to cover Gaiman. By the time she reached him, we see him in a different light. She just dropped a 59k chapter – a small book – on him. It's is long, detailed, and shines its own light on the writer and the work. If you like criticism and can bear to read on the topic, this feels both essential and definitive.
I have a basic rule of using quotes is if someone says "it's better than Watchmen" you can't use that quote, because no. However, is a fun article chewing over differing approaches and themes and hedges its bets, which is the way to go if you want to inch up to it. When I posted this online, I was asked whether the rule was about thinking Watchmen comparisons to anything is spurious, or whether it's that a negative comparison to someone's work is just bad. It’s both. For almost any other comic, it’s the latter. For Watchmen, while it’s a big enough icon to probably take it, but will just provoke a “fuck off” from folks who read the line.
There's probably an irony in that in the week I finally got around to cancelling my Guardian sub over a particularly awful transphobic column, that they also ran this fascinating interview with Sophie Lewis about her new book, Enemy Feminisms, tracing the history of (to be blunt) fascist-adjacent feminisms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the interview came from the US office.
This is long already so the promised long outro is a little out of place. Instead, I'll share a photo from my signing last week in London, where I was honored to say hello to one of the world's biggest celebrity autobiographical comic creators.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
26.1.2025