327: we are all Eliza Doolittle.
Hullo
Just a girl in the underworld
Exquisiter
Hellworld
Liana
Links
Bye
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The next issue of The Power Fantasy is out next week. This means it’s time for a preview. This means it’s time for me to resize some jpgs to fit the newsletter.
Issue 8 is the long awaited deep dive into Eliza Hellbound. This is The Power Fantasy as its most melodramatic, and i’m all here for it.
I actually nearly typoed “Eliza Doolittle” there. They are very different Elizas, but now I write that, I’m thinking of the similarities too. In many ways, we are all Eliza Doolittle.
Anyway – out next week. This is the bit emotional melodramatic one, in the best tradition of all things good. Caspar especially brings us an end of the world with real visual poetry.
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DOUBLE IMAGE: Michael Walsh on Exquisite Corpses
Last week we talked to James Tynion about Exquisite Corpses. This week we talk to Michael Walsh, about the collaboration, bringing the team together and the whole card game thing I forgot last time. A whole card game! I was so distracted by its ideas I forgot one whole part of it. Exquisite Corpses is the 13-issue-season writer-room-guided story of the 12 secret families ruling america dropping 12 colorful killers into an isolated town to fight it out to decide who’s top dogs for the next five years. In short: It’s a book set to explode the year, and I was so excited that I’ve been saying it’s twelve issues instead of thirteen. Fact checking, eh?
I'm fascinated by Writer/Artists. I mainly work with artists who at least have designs on telling their own stories, and all the collaboration there. You're someone who has done it all. Hell, with the Silver Coin you've upturned the "standard" structure and have the art being the consistent element in an anthology book, and the writers rotating. You're clearly someone who thinks about this - how do you decide what you want to be in a project? What attracts you to a project? And key - what attracted you to this one?
I had always planned to be a writer/artist. Coming up in my early twenties, I had designs for being the next Mike Mignola. A guy who wrote books that were exactly what he felt like drawing at that moment. It didn’t work out that way early in my career; pitching books as a Writer/Artist when you are a complete nobody is a tough racket. I met Ed Brisson and we had Comeback through Image, my career started sailing from there, and I put writing on the back burner.
After working on WFH art duties for almost ten years, I started feeling creatively unfulfilled, so I decided to go all in on a creator-owned comic that I was the lead creative on, which led to The Silver Coin. This project changed my career and also changed the way I looked at taking on new projects. I love writing and telling my own stories, building my own worlds. That’s always going to be a priority for me now. That said, I really think there is something special about the way collaboration works in the comic book medium. I generally have 3 projects on the go at one time (usually more). One book I’m writing for myself, one I’m writing for another artist and one that I’m drawing with a different writer. I have a very busy brain and these all flex different muscles and fulfill me creatively in different ways.
For EXC (Exquisite Corpses) specifically, James and I had known each other for a long time as we came up in the industry together. We’d planned to do SOMETHING together for a while, and finally, I brought him on board as a writer on issue 11 of Silver Coin. We had so much fun on that issue, and our storytelling sensibilities lined up so perfectly that we knew we’d have to do something bigger. When James lined up some funding for Tiny Onion we jumped on a zoom and he tossed the kernel of the idea that would become EXC my way. It sounded right up my alley and immediately I had ideas for the killers, the world and ways I wanted to push it visually… a more bombastic, horror punk direction than the other works that I’d done. We were off to the races…
The Card game. I didn't ask James about the card game at all. That's a huge oversight. Care to talk about it? You're someone who've moved in the field of card games before, of course. Has that experience shaped this?
Yes! We were on one of the early calls, and we were talking about the Battle Royale idea and its relationship to other media, including video games and board games. I think I commented, “It would be so cool to develop a game based on these killers, let people have their own battle royale and roleplay a bit.” I couldn’t get that idea out of my head and it rolled around in my subconscious for a few months. I built a rough framework for what a simplified Social Strategy Card Game could look like and we tested it on white-erase cards at our first storytelling summit with the whole Tiny Onion team. It was an absolute blast, and I think in that moment we all realized that there was something special there
I’ve been working for Wizards of the Coast doing art for Magic: The Gathering over the last few years and it’s definitely given me some insight on how games like this are built and tested but you’re never prepared until you actually do the creating. I hired an incredible group of playtesters to help make sure everything was balanced and tuned so that we’d have a really tight game experience when the time came to share this with the world.
My goal was to make a game like Magic: The Gathering but completely remove the massive barrier of entry and high learning curve. I wanted to make a fun card game that was easy to pick up and play immediately with very few pieces. I added more social strategy elements (akin to something like Werewolf) and some randomization and came up with what feels like a completely new experience. I think fans of the comic and games in general are going to have a blast.
Specifically the visual side of this - I've talked to James about the iconic nature of the cast. You're doing the first issue, but not all the issues - the jam side is writers and artists. How's that working - the pressure of setting a tone and vibe and style, and then letting others take it places? Or is it more fluid than that? A bible for the characters (as people) is something people talk about a lot in a shared project... but a visual bible seems as important, if not more so.
It was, and is, an incredible amount of work, which is being facilitated by the amazing people at Tiny Onion. I did a big bible of setting, element and character designs early in the project, and even still, every week, I need to jump back in and design something that multiple artists will be drawing in their issues so that there is rock-solid continuity. One of the big goals of this, artistically, was to make sure that every issue felt like a piece of a whole. I’m overseeing everything with the help of Tiny Onion so on top of Writing, Editing and Co-Creating, I guess you could say I’m a visual coordinator. The aesthetic tone of the book all comes back to the Horror-punk aesthetic I championed early on. Taking reference points from risographed show posters, stickered guitar cases, and old album covers. Video games were also a big part of the visual identiy, I love the feeling of walking into a boss room and seeing that boss for the first time, that big character introduction was something we wanted to have for each Killer in the first issue. Aside from all this, maybe the most crucial thing that brings all the art together is the incredible work of Jordie Bellaire, who is colouring the whole series. She brings a lot of Unity to the art styles and works hard to make sure the page to page art changes are seamless.
James talked about him trying to capture a bit about the frenzy of a work-for-hire writers room, where many ideas and e flowing. James has done it, and trying to recapture that lightning. Unless I'm wrong (and I may be - in which case, I'm sorry) you haven't, right? In which case, how did you find it? How did it compare to your other collaborative experiences?
You’re right! This was my first writers room, though I’ve been in lots of calls with TV/FILM people for Silver Coin stuff and I’ve broke stories on calls in the past so I’ve got a bit of experience in that scenario. This was the first time being in the room with this many writers and it was electric. There was an overwhelming amount of creative energy and excitement about the project which led to an extremely industrious weekend of breaking the entire 13 issue series. James and I led the room and had each writer break down their issues then we all jammed it out into a cohesive arc. It was exhilarating. It felt like my old days of playing in bands and writing entire songs while jamming on one person’s simple riff. Usually, I’ll have a zoom call for a project and then have time on my own to collate my ideas. In this room there was a lot of thinking out loud which led the story in directions both me and James weren’t expecting. It was some of the most fun I’ve had cracking a story and I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people.
How did the collaborators get gathered? How were your team of killers picked?
We we really lucky with the group of writers we recruited as it ended up being the perfect balance of more thoughtful, introspective people, people grinding out ideas and the people who asked the hard questions. I think for a writers room to be successful it has to have that proper balance. I really learned a ton in and out of the room on this project, not only from my own intuition but from people experienced in the room like Pornsak and Che. We tried to recruit a balance of people from the hop to feel like we had a lot of distinct voices in the writers room but we weren’t prepared with how well it all lined up.
Exquisite Corpses is available to pre-order now from Image Comics. Speak to your retailer before orders cut off on Monday.
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When writing this, the news from the British Supreme Court came through. I’m sitting and listening to the radio, and every half hour, it broadcasts and feels like living in a dictatorship stuff, an exposition device one would use if they were feeling lazy. Living it, makes me think it’s less lazy. That’s how we live through the times. I sit, and look out over a beautiful day in Bath, and elsewhere in the country a group of people who’ve excluded the marginalised group in question, decide that they should have less rights than they had yesterday.
While the “wait to see what experts actually say what it means, and be careful not to consume the progaganda”, I do flick and see a headline of “I campaigned against Section-28 in the 1980s” and find myself thinking “And you campaign for it in 2025”.
Love to all Trans people living through this. It’s an abomination.
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This was nice to see. The great Liana Kangas drew this The Power Fantasy piece, with colours by Brittany Peer. Hail Liana! Hail Brittany!
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It’s Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best #2’s order cut off this week too - speak to your retailer. Chrissy has dropped more preview material on the bindings site.
7This was great. We Called Them Giants is on the shortlist for the 2025 Hugos. We’d obviously love anyone’s support – it’s a lovely volume, and in some ways feels like one of the most Hugo-audience-friendly things we’ve ever done.
Acid Box’s kickstarter is going to go live so sign up for updates – basically it’s a dimension-skipping story that circles rave culture. Written by Sara Kenney and a dancefloor of artists, it seemed to answer a line of my own thoughts. I wasn’t a 1989 raver, and The Power Fantasy is in part of exploring that period. I really like seeing this filtered-history-of-dance-as-psychic adventure dropping. I gave a quote, which basically was “Take your mind to another dimension: pay close attention” which is pretty shameless.
When Stephanie and me were in Italy, we did a few interviews, which were fun – Stephanie and I rarely get a chance to do one together. Here’s one which has gone live on Youtube with No Dice Unrolled.
Cherie Priest writes about the weird hilarity of grief, as she’s lost her beloved dog, Greyson.
Tegan O’Neil was surprised by the response she got from her essay on the first Thomas Covenant books. As in, lots of people read it, including you lot. So she’s carried on reading the books, and written more. Its got a pun name for the ages, and you can read it here. Melenkurion and the Infinite Sadness. Wow. This bit certainly got me thinking: "Louis and Lestat are objectively far, far worse people by every metric than Thomas Covenant, and yet you’d have little compunctions about passing a copy of Interview with a Vampire to a coworker. If you love Covenant? It’s probably not going to come up until we know each other really well." That’s saying a lot about what fantasy is “for” and what horror is “for” – by which, I mean the demographics they cater to.
Charlie Jane writes about writing believable characters in unbelievable situations. I think of this a lot. The “An unwillingness to follow the plot” got me hmming. I sometimes think that a big part of what we consider “genre” is the stuff which passes without comment, because you have to accept it to get to the stuff people are there for. I also admire Charlie Jane putting all this stuff out here. I’m interested that whenever I do talk craft, I talk the equivalent of sentence structure, and that’s fairly common for comic creators. I have theories on that, of course, as I have theories on everything.
Oh! The Mindless Ones are back, Newslettering. Hurrah.
The WicDiv covers collection is starting to reach people in the US, which means it’s a great time for this to drop. Kara and Tia are doing a podcast discussing each issue of WicDiv via the medium of its covers – specifically, what a cover does. This is art appreciation and trying to teach the eyes to see in a fun format. You’ll dig it. Go listen.
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To give you an idea about this week, yesterday I had was going to have a meeting in London, so I went to London, and then I checked the meeting, and it was a zoom call.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
16.4.2025