Hullo

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Bye

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This is out this week, where Rossi Gifford and myself do a short story for the new Creepshow superhero-themed anthology. It’s also got a second short from Ryan North and Derek Charm too. There’s a quick interview with the project from me and Ryan here, if you want to know more.

My story is a riff around Spider-man, with a lot of the Fly and more of my own biological background. In interviews, I’ve been jokingly saying it was born of me asking “what would Adrian Tchaikovsky do?” plus a little extra “if he was drunk and in an exceedingly bad mood.”

There’s more in the mix too – it was written in the period I was working on the Criminal TTRPG for Ed and Sean, so there’s a little of Last of the Innocents in there – I talked about Dazed & Confused with Rossi as a reference too. Sure, it’s teenagers, but they lean towards kids in a crime story rather than how they get sanitised. Rossi really works the angle – she handles the horror stuff perfectly, but it’s how she grounds it which makes it sing.

Probably easiest if I just show the first two pages, right?

Available from all good comic shops now, etc.

I don’t often say yes to much anthology work, just because the amount of time is always much more than you’d think – at least, for me. But when Ben at Skybound reached out with this, I realised I had a handful of short story ideas I’d never use anywhere else, which could be fun to do here. One fit the bill – the others were a bit too silly – and I was going to work on that.

Except then I realised that it’s an idea which I didn’t fit really sat in a short-story format, and in fact, I could use as a kick off to a much bigger thing. So I, somewhat embarrassedly, withdrew the pitch, and then had to come up with a whole idea from scratch to not leave them in the lurch. Because that would be double rude, right?

And this lovely little monster emerged from the plughole.

The irony, of course, is that the story Ryan and Derek do is actually a very similar concept to the one I wanted to do. Doh.

This was fun – Rossi is an amazing talent, and I’d love to work with her again, and Skybound were great to work with. Hope you like it.

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I think the March Script Club will be something I haven’t given anything out yet.

Uber: Invasion #1 will (probably) be March’s Script Club.

The “probably” is that I have to double-check there’s nothing in here which is a spoiler for the last four scripts, as it would be a terrible thing to leak the end of a book after so long. Uber scripts are a lot, as you can imagine. Daniel and I had been working together quite a while now, so it’s not as heavy as other times, but it’s still dense with reference – and as this was a relaunch issue, also doing a lot of work to re-establish the story so far.

If you want details of Script Club, it’s here. In short – at the end of each, I send you a script (or similar length of material) and you pay $5. It goes towards the costs of running the Newsletter, and is much appreciated.

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• Another week, another link to a Joe Quesada newsletter, where he’s going through the nuts and bolts of comic storytelling. This time it’s about Size Matters. If you’ve heard me talk about writing comics, you’ve likely heard me say “Size is meaning” and it’s that area that Joe is going in deep here. Lots of examples of what he specifically means. He doesn’t tell an anecdote I’ve heard him tell here, but the one I often think of is him teaching this lesson to an artist. Joe describes giving storybeats for a hypothetical Batman (I think) story, and asking how the artist would choose to draw it. It’s like… Batman bursts through the window, huge splash image, etc. Then, after pages of that, Joe says “And then the bomb goes off and it’s a Nuclear explosion”. The scales drop off the artist’s eyes. All your storytelling choices leading up to the bomb should be about making the explosion as big as one can, or you undercut the meaning.

• David Brothers’ essays are always good, and here he is on Gorillaz, amongst other things.

• DIE: Loaded #5 was out last week, and seems to have gone down well. Here’s AIPT’s piece, and here’s ComicsXF.

• “Why do Bis like the Mummy so much?” wonders Eleanor Morton, in her first longer-form videoessay. It’s not about the film taste of the Glaswegian band who released Kandy Pop. Great to see Morton do this.

• They killed Normal, and called it Progress is an essay of a lot of things, but about the disappearing middle in mass market entertainment. It’s mainly about movies, but covers a lot. “The $38 million Julia Roberts movie served everyone. Your mom. Your coworker who thinks “foreign film” means it has subtitles. The couple on a second date who just picked the one that started at 7:30. A24 on the other hand serves the people who already know what they’re looking for, and if you already know what you’re looking for, you were never the audience that needed the middle.” I sometimes think this about comics, especially my comics, where the narrowcast was always the point (while also being a problem.)

• Second Adrian Tchaikovsky namedrop in the issue, as RRD are actually doing the licenced game of You Will Cry Over A Spider space-opera Children of Time. This is just great news – Mina is the lead on this, and I always said her generation-spanning Legacy: Life Beyond The Ruins games would be the best way to do this epic game.

• Abby Hebworth of Many Sided Media writes about it never being too late to Retcon in a TTRPG. Safety tolls are often treated as a “in the moment” thing, but really – if you don’t want to, just tweak. This is especially interesting in Actual Play. In the recent game DIE RPG game I ran with Abby and the rest of the crew, there was a section near the end I was uncomfortable with how it went down. It’s the sort of thing which was okay in the moment, but not something I was comfortable with in a game for broadcast – so we re-recorded a couple of sections, and moved a couple of beats around in a pick up. It’s only a couple of minutes in the whole game, but I’m really glad we did it.

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There are times I am aware that my temperament leans artistic. As in, I am a moody cow.

This week has been up and down. On Friday, I handed in the epic synopsis for the new project I’ve been researching for a few months and spent the week finally trying to write. Of a property I’ve never written before, and so have been twitchy around, and put in the work. Notes come back after a few hours, and basically, it’s all fine, and the editor thinks I’ve nailed it. So I go to to bed happy, basically, simple child that I am.

Next day I’m off to London for the quiet Club Night I run with Al Ewing, Sarah Gordon and Dan Hart, which is a giggle. Smaller crowd than usual, but certainly enough, and then we go do cocktails and late night Karaoke. I’m in bed stupid late for me, though “midnight” is stupid late for me now. I’m up, brunch with Al and Sarah, and then head home to the family. I’m drinking heavily (once again, for me now), but balance it enough that I don’t have a hangover. This is rare. In my feeble decrepitude, I can get a hangover off a class of wine that looks at me with intent. I head home, family time and cook pasta. It was a fun weekend.

And then I just get a stomach ache, out of nowhere, and it’s been hanging around (with various levels of intensity) ever since, and I am just a storm cloud.

With so many triggers over the weekend (Even the mascarpone in the sauce was out of date!) and the last week (stress, diet change) it could be any of the above, so I’ve got no real idea.

I think it’s actually my full IBS from my 20s relapsing. However, it’s been so long since I’ve had that, I can’t even really remember what it felt like. Though if so, what triggered it? There’s so many options. I suspect, as the internet meme would have it, “Why choose?”

With this pain and worry over what it could be, I have been unbearable. I am not someone who is sick in a way that disables me. Injuries, sure - but not this.

However, with the medication and eating soup, I appear to be okay to handle Iris and get her to nursery tomorrow, so that C can go to London for the night of her Perverse comics journal tonight.

Which is a good lead in to a plug, right?

Go see poets! I will be eating the blandest pasta I can find.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
18.3.2026