332: Dance Music was invented
Hullo
Eisners
TL;DR
TPF9
Comps
Links
Bye
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Shortly after I sent out the newsletter last week the 2025 Eisners were announced, and The Power Fantasy found itself on the list for Best New Series. This was genuinely a lovely surprise. And it really was a surprise, because if I had any suspicion we were on the shortlist, I’d have waited for the news to drop to include in that one.
In short: hurrah!
Thanks to the Judges for recognising the book. Being an Eisner Judge is a nightmarishly hard job – basically they read comics all year, and then go full-conclave for a few days to read some more and debate the final shortlist. Any time I’ve talked to a judge, I’ve been exhausted imagining it. It was hard to do even when the Eisners process were conceived, but with the amount of comics expanded the way it has, it’s become ever more difficult.
Best New Series is always a particularly hard category, just from the sheer amount of books to select from. The final list of six we’ve ended up with is feral. It’s Caspar’s first Eisner nomination, and he’s over the moon. It’s something he’s always wanted, and I’ve loved seeing him so happy about this.
There was a tumblr ask this week about what award nominations mean, and with the current Blue Sky Comics drama (which I’ll spare you), I was feeling like writing a piece about creatives and prize culture. Maybe I will next time, but I suspect to include it here would distract from the core message I want to get across.
Vote for us. We would absolutely love to win.
If you haven’t got a ballot to vote, anyone in the industry – a creative, editor, retailer, librarian, historian – can vote. You just have to apply here, and then get your votes in by June 5th.
You can imagine how many paragraphs of British dude navel-gazing and caveats I deleted from this piece.
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TL;DR: Vote for the Power Fantasy in the Eisners, go on.
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The Power Fantasy #9 is out next week, which is an intense one, where we keep a lot of plates spinning, which is particularly stressful, when they’re plates covered with handgrenades. We start with Isabella’s Very Bad Day during the day when everyone had a Very Bad Day.
Here’s the first three pages.
Out next week. It’s not too late to join this Eisner-award-nominated series.
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Just a reminder that our Launch at GOSH is next week...
I’m actually cleaning out my comps this week, so I suspect I may give stuff out to folks, assuming I can carry it down to london in a box. Which is far from guaranteed, so I probably shouldn’t say it, but now I’ve said it, guilt also makes it more likely that I will actually do it. Oh, what a dilemma.
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I loved the Thick of It, and this making of interview has lots of brutal details. I always presumed it was carefully constructed to look as chaotic as it looked, when in fact, no, it was just chaotic.
Comrade Gril linked me this old analytical piece about the level of lyrical repetition in pop music across time. I’d seen it before, but it is charming – clearly flawed on a higher level (You data shows “Dance Music Was Invented”) but to see the cold hard numbers of it is a lot of fun. Had I more time, I suspect I’d try and do the same thing in panel number and word count per page in comics.
This Crusader King bug where the game grinds to a halt as every Greek ruler decides whether they’re going to tear out the eyes of everyone they know is what I live for. One doesn’t play PC games because they’re great when they work. You play them because they’re great when they don’t.
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Busy week, packed with visitors, and a lot of work, some of which actually got done.
Somehow, my two books – one on a five to six week deadline, the other on an eight week deadline – have entered cosmic alignment and both are due this week. I got The Power Fantasy over yesterday, and need to move onto Stephanie’s next. I suspect it can wait until Monday, but it should wrap tomorrow. It’s nearly done, so it’s a question of just nailing down a couple of scenes – one of which is basically deep SAD STUFF so will probably involve me staring meaningfully in the middle distance while trying to avoid checking Blue Sky.
Hopefully, that’ll be easier. This week has actually involved me putting some things in place to try and curtail excess procrastination, which I feel has been happening more often over the last month or two. A friend told me he was basically not checking Slacks until he’s got three hours work done, and I realised I really needed to do something like that.
So, I was playing around with trying to find writing-only machines, but I really would like to work in Scrivener. The real solution there was “buy a laptop, tear out Wifi” which seemed extreme. I realised it was likely an Internet blocker (something I’ve used before) so found the one I used, but was thinking internet blocking isn’t really the main problem – it’s what I choose to have access to.
At which point, I found Cold Turkey also had released something called Micromanager which lets you set a timer, and then you can’t use any app you haven’t put on the whitelist. The free version only lets you use a single app, but that’s actually what I need right now. I turn it on, and my machine is basically a Scrivener-box. Sure, I may wander over to my phone eventually, but the point is that there’s more resistance to leaving work – the harder it is to leave (even slightly harder), the more it’s easier to just stay on the task. And if I stay on the task, eventually I just stay on the task, and find it actually hard to leave.
(Yesterday, I put the timer on for an hour, and ended up there for getting on for two.)
Yes, I’m ADHDy, how did you know?
Right – that’s enough for this week. I was going to tell you about the newts, frogs and the toads, but it can wait for next time.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
22.5.2025