361: I will spell badly
Hullo
It’s nearly too late
Monsters
Stage
Links
Bye
****
One week to go until The Power Fantasy #16. Here’s the preview we released.
We didn’t release much.
The comps also turned up this week, and they looked great.
We’re not flicking inside, for the same reason we only released one preview page.
Come on, folks. You don’t want spoilers, and you know it.
****
Next Script Club! I had a bunch of folks give suggestions, which has been really interested to see where folks brains are. As said, next time will probably be The Power Fantasy #1, but I think this time we’ll go for…
The Wicked + the Divine: 1831 will be February’s Script Club.
Our Villa Diodati riff, where Not-Byron, Not-Percy, Not Claire-Claremont and Not-Mary have a terrible time. It’s the third full issue I worked with Stephanie, and the first actual historical special for WicDiv. I’ll pick which script to use before I send it out. – I know I stripped back the captions at certain points, so giving the heavier-caption version may be intriguing. Plus this has a whole bunch of random research in.
This will be going out on January 31st.
What’s Script Club? It’s a way to help support the running of this newsletter – as I’m not on Substack, I have to pay for this, and you throwing coins in my hat covers it, and encourages me to do more writing here. It is also hugely appreciated. Basically, every month, I’ll send a script (or similarly length piece of writing) out to the subscribers. I’ll warn you in advance what I’m sending out, so you can cancel if you’re not interested. If you sign up, it’ll say “Daily” payment, which means that when I send the mail, you’ll be charged. When the payment comes through it’ll be charged from Lemon Ink, just in case you wonder where this mysterious $5 charge is coming from.
I should just write a standard version of this and cut and paste it, but that level of intelligence has never been my forte. Why do things the easy sensible way?
****
Chrissy and I and assorted Image comrades (Jacob and Sean Phillips! Bryan Hitch!) are doing an event at Waterstones on March 9th at 7pm. It’s under the label masterclass storytelling, so presumably that’s what we’ll be talking about. Tickets are £7 and available here.
I’ve just realised that I don’t think Chrissy and I have ever been on a panel before, as writers, talking about our work. This will be fun. Come along and see my once-editor and still-wife bully me.
****
Avery Hill has just announced their kickstarter for Jules Scheele adapting Orlando into comics. Honestly, this sounds absolutely perfect and I had no idea Jules was working on this. Sign up for a reminder when it launches.
Cannibal Halfling on the five tiers of TTRPG publishing – you may pick at some numbers here, but it really does show exactly the scale difference we’re talking on, and how much D&D dominates the cultural space. The second player in the space – an estimated 30 million dollar business – exists because people didn’t like D&D 4th edition. The company created by an edition war is in the region of a hundred times bigger than most companies whose games I recommend here.
Latest Quinns Quest drops – this time it’s Public Access, one of the Carved by Brindlewood bay games. It’s just setting up for a crowdfunder for its full edition. Here’s Jim and I talking about its sister game, The Between.
This is from last year, but has been sitting in my “Stuff to link to” forever, so let’s get it in here a quiet week. Broken Frontier on the disappearance of comics journalism and commentary sites. It hasn’t got any better.
****
I’m writing this on the train back to Bath from London, in the witching hour of Thursday. This was a prime writing period when I was younger, and I suspect the Moore-ian Writing-Is-Spelling-And-Spelling-Is-Spells would approve. It’s the witching hour, so I will spell. In my case, I will spell badly.
I was in London to see the Cecil Castellucci. She said her friends, The Dears, were playing when she was over, and if anyone was around it’d be good to hang. Seeing the Dears and Cecil wasn’t something I was going resist. It’s trickier than I originally planned. I was going to come in earlier for a meeting, and stay the night, but C is ill, and leaving her alone caring for Iris solo any more than I need to isn’t right. Plus while Iris has been sleeping better recently, that may change.
To be specific there – she’s slept through for the last five nights. She had not slept through for the previous month and change. In a “sometimes two hours awake” kind of thing.
So, I’m coming back, in case it happens again and we need all hands on our familial deck. Though I hope it doesn’t, as this train is running late, and it’s going to be 2am before my head is anywhere near a pillow. This is could be painful.
But the trip was worth it. I could have come back earlier, but made the call at 10 to 10 of “fuck it, I’m in.”
Cecil was great – she’s one of the people who is a burst of light. We spend some time trying to work out when we actually first met and couldn’t actually place it. Which is strange – the nature of comics means cons are amorphous and soft things, and you can strike up friendships almost accidentally.
The Dears were great, and while I don’t remember the moment I met them, I do remember the period intensely. It’s 2004. I’d just moved to Bristol. I saw them play back in Bath, in Moles – gone now, closed because the landlords wanted to do something else with the property. One of the great venues in the SW was lost forever because of a shower of arseholes.
I digress.
While at the same time, you can see why they didn’t. There is a bit too much of an ordinary band in there. You can even see it tonight – Murray and Natalia looking fine in monochrome, and the rest of the band dressed like men who play in bands. That’s a useful metaphor for them, alas. The Dears – they seem to be one third of a truly first-class great band. That’s not a bad score.
But I did love them. I loved them a lot.
They were from the very last period in my life when “a guitar band” was at least a potential positive rather than a negative to be overcome. I was still in the market for smart guitar bands with ideas, and the Dears were there. It was Peak Proto-Phonogram Period. I’d just written the first issue. Heartless Romantic from the earlier album was a very Kohl record.
I was also in a relationship which was at least starting to spiral, before hitting the ground, and bouncing into the air, spinning a bit more and setting itself on fire.
I lived in Bedminster, as much as one can.
So I think of the Dears, and stomping around in the rain, in and out of the city centre, with 22: The Death Of All The Romance coating me, making it all feel romantic and awful, like we were spectral figures bestriding an apocalyptic wasteland, soaring on wings patched together from synths, and not two people in a flat above a fancy dress shop.
It was a bad period, and the Dears soundtracked it. It was a bad period with worse to come. Put it like this: I wasn’t playing No Children on repeat yet.
When their next album came out – Gang of Losers - I reviewed it for Plan B, and kicked it. I thought it was dead and lifeless. I listened to it earlier – I think it’s a fall off from No Cities Left, but perhaps not worth the brutality. I figured it was a disappointed fan response, but I wonder if it’s not quite that.
When a band has been so tied to one bad period that you don’t want to return there and simultaneously you don’t want anything other than exactly what they gave you then.
Murray starts the encore with the opening track of Gang of Losers. Just the guitar, by himself, telling a story about his daughter’s birth and how this is the song which stopped her crying. He talks about family, and is clearly proud of his daughter, now on the merch table, in her own bands. I think of the guy I saw live in 2004, and remember that he didn’t seem happy then. He did tonight. As melodramatic, and sexy, and funny as anything else.
Really, the stuff that absolutely slapped was where they got bigger and rocked out – the complicated bit of 22: Death of all the romance fell apart – but the extended climax was blissful noise, and ending in some make-up styled pure rock-and-roll testifying. And beauty. I wish in four years, I’m as cool as Murray. I wish I was ever as cool as Murray was tonight. Or Natalia. I’m not fussy.
But we come back to this – I wrote about a souring relationship and how the album was tied to that period, because I’m telling the story of my time with the Dears. And clearly, some stuff has been churned up – but churned up in the writing this, not in the gig itself.
In the gig, that’s not what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how happy I was to see them happy, and alive, how we shared a space together and this is pretty beautiful, and I’m amazed we get to do this.
The gig ended with the chant that is the new (good) album’s title “Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful!” I don’t argue.
There’s a concept in Phonogram of “Curse songs.” A song that is tied to a specific memory that renders it a literal curse – transporting you back to that painful moment. It’s an idea that people latched onto, as the metaphor is clear. Writing this makes me think that this story I’d have done eventually if we kept on writing Phonogram. That for all the virulence of a curse song, curses fade. I can listen to the Dears, and tell the story of where I was when I loved it, but it’s not a curse any more. It’s life, as lived, and as the patina of horror is eroded away by time, the the eternal beauty of music remains. Which feels a good thing to tell people who are thinking they’ll never touch a curse song again.
Chrissy messaged now.
Iris is awake.
Jinxed it.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
19.2.2026