349: Not A Robyn Reference
Hullo
OfflineOnline
OnlineSoon
What’s he up to?
Seeekrit bit
Me Yabbering
Me Yabbering Some More
Links
Bye
****
DIE: Loaded and The Power Fantasy #13 are available digitally.
This was quite the journey.
Apple always seemed to be on point. Google Play uploaded them wrong, but sorted it relatively quickly. The biggest boy on the block?
First it said they were out on the 25th of November.
The machine was prodded. Both books seemed to disappear from the system.
Then they were back back, saying they were out on Thursday 20th of November, a day seemingly unmoored from any normal comic release day.
Then they were already out on the 12th, but also unavailable to buy.
Then it went back on the 20th.
Then, on Monday, Image sacrificed a goat, and they were both released.
Phew.
I probably missed one in there. Sometimes it was different for different territories. As said, it was quite a journey.
So for those who want to buy it on Kindle/Comixology/Amazon, now they can, unless the system changes its mind between me writing this and you reading it. DIE: Loaded and The Power Fantasy #13 links are here.
****
Unconnected to any of the above, Digital Comic shop Sweet Shop is approaching its invite Beta, and you can now sign up there.
Everything I’ve seen of Sweet Shop seems great, and I’ve been using their Binding technology to hype my books.
Image books will be on there.
I urge you to sign up to secure a username, and perhaps we can all save sacrificing goats in future.
****
Okay – this is me trying something new. After this bit, there is a bit that only premium subscribers can see, as in, folks who’ve signed up for Script club. Let’s see if it works.
I probably should also include an Upgrade button, for folks who want to jump on Script Club too.
****
****
With DIE: Loaded out, a bunch of really lovely interviews dropped. Comic Frontier talked to me and Stephanie, as did AIPT comics, and I think both transcripts really are great. Traversing The Stars had me on by myself, in a video form.
Stepping away from Comics, the newsletter of the actual-play-powerhouses Many Sided Media interviewed me, and I approached DIE from a different angle, highlighting more of how it intersects with role-playing games, and even has us unpacking some GM advice stuff.
****
SKTCHD launched a new feature – specifically, THE MOMENT, the idea being Harper interviews a creator about the moment they realise a book is going to work. As you can imagine, this led to me basically overthinking what the question meant and approaching it from as many angles as I could.
The video is above, but you can read the transcript here too. Here’s a little of what I say about Journey Into Mystery….
I came to Journey into Mystery wanting to do something that was good. And that sounds like a weird way of putting it. But I was doing Uncanny X-Men, which was a book to prove that I wasn’t a complete weirdo. And Journey into Mystery was, no this one’s for me. I’m going to try to make people buy a book that’s about this complete weird stuff. We’re trying to tie into all these crossovers and make it work.
I had this big sort of plan of how it would lay out. And I explained it to my editor, Lauren Sankovitch, who took over what was going on in book. I said that basically there’s this character called Leah, we’re going to do something terrible to her in issue 18, and if we do it right, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. You can hear my cackle there.
We hit issue 18. It was a book that was always popular on the internet. It really had a very intense fandom. It hit issue 18, and my god, weeping tears, gnashing teeth, just lots of screaming, instant fan art of trying to redo the wrong.
I sort of just wandered into the next room to tell my wife. “The internet’s really crying. They’re very upset.” “And do you feel good?” And it was like…no, I feel terrible. I didn’t enjoy it at all. But it worked. That was the first big beat where I was like, oh yeah, now the entire end game’s fine, because that’s the first bit which proves the plan is working.
And that’s where it counts.
****
The League of Comic Geeks AMA was last week, on Thursday. I finally finished it on Monday. There was a lot of questions, on a lot of topics. You can read them all here . I’ll likely pull out some answers and run in future newsletters, perhaps in little themed bunches. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, I think. There’s also a lot of people who really want to know about Aphra, and who can blame ‘em.
Charlie XCX and John Cale together is not something I’d have thought of, but here it is. Pop music is amazing, and especially when it’s a big ol’ gothic mansion. On a similar pop music note, I had multiple people presume that the last newsletter’s subject line was a reference to Robyn’s new single Dopamine and shocked when it wasn’t in there at all. For once, it was not a Robyn reference.
Buttondown – who host this newsletter – interviewed me for their blog. Here it is. Honestly, it’s fun to write for people who know absolutely nothing of who I am. I even picked up some folks.
This was linked to me by many people, so perhaps worth linking if only to pre-empt any more: why Elon Musk really needs the scientific Racism of D&D. (Not that I really mind multiple folks sending me stuff, I stress. I just want to save folks’ time.)
I met the creator of Very Hungry Women at Thought Bubble this weekend. Her first comic was WicDiv. When she was 11. I turned to dust, especially when I saw how good this looked – a sort of smart feminist pop superhero book, which reminded me of the sort of anger of things like Bitch Planet and Golden Rage. Its crowdfunder has just gone live, and you can go back it here.
****
The tentpole of the week was Thought Bubble, which did everything you hope Thought Bubble does. It’s a big, pure comics event – I was chatting to an American guest who was here for the first time, who said that she’d had it compared to various comic-pure cons in the US, and felt it really was different – if only as it was so much bigger than most of them. It’s a whole convention center full of comics. As other newcomer Chloe Maveal said: “I haven’t seen a Funko in three days.”
It was also the only sizeable con I’ve done this year. As said, I’ve been isolated, so it was just very good to make human contact with my peers and audience. Speaking to folks in a launch week is always great, and the TPF readers were on tenterhooks. Both Stephanie and Caspar were there, and I managed to have real human time with both of them, at different stages in the books – one just after the launch, the other as we reach a crucial point and decide on the direction.
I was also sitting next to Megan Huang, and we spent a lot of time talking about Dinosaurs.
Here’s my haul of stuff, born of stuff folks have brought to me, and stuff which I grabbed in my berserk one-hour run after my music-and-comics workshop.
Sarah Gordon organised the DJs on Saturday night, and had me for a set. Mojo remains a lovely venue for a party, and a bad place for an actual dance party – this year were basically in the area of one of the bars, meaning that there was very little dancing until the drinking had slowed a little. Then, it went big, as it always did and my voice got annihilated by howling again.
This led to the morning after my voice being absent. I actually made a series of communication cards to use…
...but I actually recovered to a croaky level very quickly. I still used them occasionally. If you want a demonstration of them, I’m doing it on my stories on Instagram right now.
Thought Bubble marks the end of the season, for me. My plate is now in a clear run to the New Year, and finding a route through there. It’s telling I had another fairly large story idea over the weekend, and also started on a non-fiction thing the day I got back. It does leave you fired up.
I returned to a bunch of fun stuff waiting for me too. For example, Rowan Rook & Decard have released the preview PDFs of their stretch goals for Hollows. Each is a beautifully designed booklet, done with a different artist, presented in a different mode. They really are transformational.
You may remember this is what my map looked like...
This is how it ended up.
Artists are amazing. In this case, Daniel Vega. This is only a taste of it, really. You should see the bosses.
The first time I tried to screenshot that, a pop-up advertising AI features in Adobe Reader jumped in the way, ruining the screenshot, meaning I had to do it all again. This is proof that AI reduces productivity.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
20.11.2025