322: Haci(world)enda
Hullo
Summer Loving (Slight return)
Nonni
Giantier
Good Covers
Links
Bye
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One week until The Power Fantasy #8 drops and we start getting some details on the Second Summer of love.
And it starts like this...
Less Hacienda, more Haci(world)enda. In shops next week, and more details about the book(as always) the Power Fantasy primer. I just updated it so it includes a link to all of issue 1. I’ll likely add a page to it later at the end of the preview pages, to point in the direction of reading more. Honestly, it’s this sort of basic thing which makes Bindings really neat.
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In April, Golden Rage is showing its not ready for the retirement home, coming out for a second series. Orders closing on the coming Monday, so I figured it’s a good time for an interview with writer, Chrissy Williams. I’m biased about this one as much as one can be – I’m married to her - but that means I’ve been close enough to see this together, and it delights me. An island where post-menopausal women have been abandoned by a society and left to fight it out. “Battle Royale Meets the Golden Girls” is the easy pitch, but it’s not a book that chooses easy. I’m struck by the team’s choices throughout – it’s a book about conflict, but it centres solidarity and the cast’s shared humanity. It’s also just plain fucking weird. The second series picks up where the last one ended, with the women waiting for an invasion from the mainland… and then goes in a different direction. This is my favourite sort of grandma of a comic, with that twinkle in its eye that knows it’s causing trouble.
I talked to Chrissy about what it’s like to bring it back.
It's a killer high concept. "Battle Royale Meets the Golden Girls." There's an easy way to do it. It's to do it straight - exploitation violence pulp explosion with entertaining old ladies. That sounds fun, but while it absolutely includes that, it skews. It's weirder, more personal, oblique, and at any chance avoids the obvious thing. The drinking of tea is as important as the wielding of axes, and it's clear you love the cast. Basically, do you not like money?
I suppose a more accurate elevator pitch would be "come for the grandma-on-grandma action, stay for the seven-page clowning sequence that explores infertility and pregnancy loss" -- but it's a bit wordy. Hmmm. I guess I would say that, for me, the sheer relentlessness of endless violence sounds a little... implausible? Not to mention exhausting? I mean -- when's the tea coming? Can I have a sit down? Are there biscuits? Battle Royale is definitely in there, but I wanted something just slightly more grounded. I think it's a reflection of the ages and life experience of the characters. Battle Royale was about being a teenager - my favourite age for melodrama. By the time we get to menopause, I feel like everyone deserves their own internal Bea Arthur, rolling her eyes at how ludicrous the world is. You need humour to survive, I think.
It's your second comic series. Like, showing my age, I remember I came to my second phonogram series - the singles club - with a lot of chips on my shoulder in terms of things I wanted to better position. Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best seems more confident than that. What were your goals, hopes and themes?
Well, we certainly don't have as much to say about Blondie as Phonogram does... There are two sides to this. One is just wanting to be back in that world, to figure out what would happen to these characters next. Both Lauren, the artist, and I really do love these characters a lot, and we love spending time with them. Two, having established this optimistic community, I wanted to think more about how it might actually work. It's a way for me to channel ideas about female friendships and support networks, and especially intergenerational trauma and relationships, as well as what can challenge our sense of community, whether internal politics, or physical hardship, health, family, personality, even. Also I wanted to set it in winter, because blood on snow looks awesome.
In your other life you're a published poet. With Tom Humberstone you published an introduction to Poetry Comics, and your collaboration An Introduction To Charts won a Selkie Award for best Narrative. Care to talk a bit about poetry comics, and how that impacts your thinking when working in more genre work?
Ah, so many other lives... Yep, poetry is the beginning and end for me, I think. So doing a narrative comic like Golden Rage is a really interesting formal challenge for my brain. As you can probably tell from the aforementioned clown / miscarriage sequence, I'm not super interested in just acting out the conventional tropes of action plots - unless I'm exploiting them for comedic value, or trying to point out that "look, older women can do this shit too FFS." I feel awful for these wonderful characters and the various hells I put them through, especially when some of them are channelling really personal experiences of grief and loss. I'm trying to write credible, nuanced, rounded people, and they become very real to me.
It's a bit different in poetry comics. The "character" to some extent is the voice that speaks the words, and no one gets to know how much it really is or isn't "me". Poetry plays with that tension. The artist then has to choose whether to show any actual characters on the page, and how the images will flow and support / contradict / juxtapose the words. It's not about building character, or plot - it's about using language and art to put unexpected ideas and images together. And I go in knowing there will be art in there to carry meaning too, so I'm explicitly writing words that lean into that. Of course, that's not unique to poetry comics, but they somehow feel like a really clean true example of how text and art work together in comics.
I've worked with Tom on our own poetry comics for such a long time (we're working on a new one atm). I now just send him the text itself, and he goes off and blocks it all out and composes the pages into roughs. Then he sends it back, and we chat about any areas where the pacing feels like it needs to change, or what have you, and we work on it together. But really it's all him. The epitome of "no comic exists if it hasn't been drawn -- the script is not the comic". The poem isn't a blueprint, or film script, it's a springboard. It was really exciting that Introduction to Charts won the Selkie Award for "Best Narrative". I think, or hope, there's an increasing appetite for interesting and unconventional storytelling.
I wrote this question, almost as a joke, thinking I'd expand or delete it, but I realised that it actually perhaps stands best alone. So let's just say it: You like women. Discuss.
I never used to. I grew up with all the internalised misogyny the eighties and nineties could throw at me. And then one day I woke up and realised all my favourite music was by women. And all my favourite writing was by women. And that the brash sarcastic irony bullshit adopted by so many of my 90s-raised male friends was all just smoke and mirrors. They didn't own what was good. They didn't own what was important. I've had to unlearn all that (I'm still unlearning it) and so it just seemed like WRITE WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE INTERESTED IN was the best thing to do. And it so happens I am interested in the Golden Girls and being angry and drinking tea and wondering what it would be like to exist without men.
Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best is available on April 9th. It can be pre-ordered before Monday 17th from your local retailer. If you want to know more, here’s a primer. Its lunar code is 0225IM300.
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This is fun news. We Called Them Giants has been shortlisted for the Foreword INDIES FINALIST award. It's really nice to be included in something selected by booksellers and librarians, who clearly see so much stuff.
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Also, a delight this week has been seeing folks getting copies of The Wicked + the Divine: The Covers Version. I got my copies a few days before everyone else, and so was exciting to see everyone else go through the joy I did when opening the box. Look at these…
The Dinosaur is a real cloned dinosaur, to give an idea of the scale. They’re just enormous, the print is astounding and it’s the coffee-table book of our dreams. It’s lovely. Hurrah to Katie West for running it incredibly well, and Courtney Vokey. for designing the beast.
It’s not the only WicDiv stuff at the moment too. The Wicked + the Divine Compendium on May 28th, which I’m looking forward to seeing. Having it all in one huge book is a real thing.
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For All Nerds had me on to talk a lot of things, but mainly The Power Fantasy. This is a good one. Ben Ha and Tatiana are smart and fun. Also, quick plug for Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze where he, Mellow Brown and Tom Mandrake do a space-opera take on Hendrix.
Fluxblog compiles 10 excellent old posts writing about REM]. I’ve been thinking about REM a bit over the last year or so – basically, since The Bear resurrected Strange Currencies, so I enjoyed this.
Trying to cause psychic damage to old people such as I, Jamie linked to this article linking the connections between the 30-years-old Elastica and the 20-years old Arular in a piece which, in itself, is 10 years old now. The thing which struck me is basically the whole of Kohl’s backstory up to the first panel of Rue Britannia happens between those two dates. The whole character was born there, and it seemed so long, while it is also very small. Time, it comes at you.
While the deadnaming herein is crap, this piece on the rationalist-cult-goes-on-murder-spree is so berserk and such a portrait of so much that’s going on, that I’m going to link to it with caveats anyway. It’s an methamphetamine Gibsonian short story, but real.
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Last week was mainly about finishing the next Power Fantasy #9, which has an Isabella focus as a backbone, but features something from the whole cast. It’s one of the most complicatedly structured issues I’ve done in The Power Fantasy, but it’s the sort of complicated that if anyone notices, it’s a failure. It took a lot of work – though all TPF does, really. I’m aware that it’s taking me a working week and a half to get a TPF script in shape, and I normally comfortably do a script in a week. I then spent the rest of that second week wrapping the backmatter, which does mean that it’s taking at least a couple of weeks a month to do each issue. Hmm. This comic, eh?
The backmatter is worth talking about. I’ve finally managed to do something I’ve wanted to do since the start of this whole thing. The interviews are great, but I’m frustrated that I’m limited to doing one a month – though seven actually has two. There’s so many more image books than that I’d like to spotlight. So, I’ve got the advance PDFs for April’s books, and done a page of capsule pieces introducing them all, which will be in TPF 8, and any other Image comic that has the space to run them. I’ll likely include it here too.
I still plan to do an interview when I have space, but that may not be for a while. Issue 9 hopefully will be Rian’s essay on design, and issue 10 is a letters page… which means issue 11 is the first I’m certain we’ll have space for an interview. To that end, I’m going to start running more interviews in the newsletter – Chrissy’s Golden Rage is in this one, and we’ll have Deniz Camp on Assorted Crisis Events next week. They’ll be Q&A rather than profile pieces, but I’m really enjoying seeing smart creators talking directly, so I think you will too.
C was away this weekend, so I’ve been solo parenting with all that entails, so I returned to work on Monday with my inbox a jungle. I’ve been doing other stuff, but the most important stuff has been trying to tame my mail. It’s getting better, but presently has nineteen still to answer. The problem with responding to e-mails is that folks write back, which seems actively disruptive.
The majority of my creative writing this week has been RPG stuff – writing the multiple-table DIE Scenario we’ll hopefully be running at events this year (“Project Pillow Fort”). It exists in a rough draft, and I’ll be adding more meat and lobbing to Chant to see what he thinks. Also, when my usual game with friends on Tuesday cancelled, led to me pulling together a first playtest for something I’ve been noodling on. It’s an Agon-Hack/Paragon System game which I was calling Primacy, but Coyote and Crow have just announced a card game with that title, so probably not. “Primacy, But Not That One” is probably a bad idea.
I pulled together what I have and got it on the table to just kick the tyres a little, and see if it was fun. The core mechanic would work – it’s the Paragon system, and John Harper and Sean Nittner have something that’s rock solid – but it’s a question of the fiction, the approach and the weirder structural stuff I’m doing.
Basically, it’s a historical epic game system, that plays at a much higher scale than games normally do. So each dice roll defines the results of a larger bit of fiction. At the minimum, it’s a whole scenarios worth of content, which whole books of fiction flying past the table. What I think is neat is how it actually generates the world, which uses a lot of tech lifted from boardgames – mainly using a deck of cards (double-sided) generating the opportunities and threats that the players have to choose how to prioritise, and then those decisions (and the results of those attempts) impacting the game in a fluid way. Factions enter your empire, give you missions, rebel and so on. Basically, it’s using board game light-simulation tech to fuel a narrative history game – basically, like reading a biography of Caesar or Warmaster Horus. Its feral, but feral in the way history is – a game about these monstrous empire builders, what happens to them, and how an empire collapses in on itself.
Here’s a screenshot of the table. I’m using art I grabbed from Warhammer, just to get a prototype cooking.
Basically, it worked about as well as I could have hoped given its state. As said, Agon is a sure pair of hands underlying it all, but the things which I felt would be a cool thing for a player to do absolutely landed. Honestly, when Katie succeeded on her “investigate this signal from deep space” mission, then flipped the card to find a Tyranid invasion and the whole table yelped loud enough for C to message me to close the fucking door, I knew I was onto something.
So fun to have something to play with, especially as it’s such a modular job. Came away with a bunch of small tweaks and notes, but nothing which demands a complete rewrite – most importantly, the confidence that I can absolutely run it in the present state. The next step is likely running it across 3-4 episodes. I’m still not sure what fictional wrapper I want for it – it started with “your own version of the Horus Heresy in 4 sessions”, but I realised its approach land just as hard for (say) the end of the Roman Republic, with players as analogues for Pompey, Caesar, Crassus and the rest. I suspect I’ll do the former as “rival space bastards” needs less research, right? Though I’m aware the part of me which is spending two weeks on every issue of The Power Fantasy may mug me.
Anyway. Even on a quiet week, I’m busy. But at least I’ve written an actual outro this time.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
12.3.2025