Hullo

DIE10
Once&AgainAsAnOmnibus
Bridgette Too Far
A God Is Not Just For Christmas
Links
Bye

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DIE: Loaded #10 drops this week, where we start to turn towards the climax. It’s our first episode primarily inside the often-mentioned Dreaming Lands. One thing I find striking about DIE: Loaded – apart from Stephanie just taking this thing places any time she puts the stylus near tablet – is how it’s balancing so many tones. I don’t think it’s quite as much as last issue (the broad satire to cosmic horror whiplash was a lot) but it’s still a whole load of material here, plus something I suspect folks have been hoping/dreading for all along. Hope you like it.

I did the preview last week, if you want a taste, and Alison Sampson gives us a great guest cover.

Don’t know DIE: Loaded? Have a nose here.

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This has crept up on me, which is hard to imagine considering it’s the size of a hobbit torso. The Once & Future omnibus is available in comic shops, collecting the whole 30 issues series, by Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain. Ed Dukeshire and myself. It’s a story about a retired monster hunter who drags her unknowning grandson into the family business when King Arthur comes back (in a bad way). It’s got a heart, and is the fun end of my work, while playing with some of my core themes: in this case stories can be antithetical to humanity’s continued existence, but they can be blown apart by a shotgun.

It’s horror-action and is literally 30 issues of Dan Mora drawing the most berserk takes on Arthuriana you can hope for, and would make an ideal Christmas present.

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Actually, as it’ll drop on Halloween, and O&F is at least Horror adjacent, let’s make this month’s Script club be…

Once & Future #1 will be sent out on October 31^st.

Script Club is the premium subscription for this newsletter, which is used to keep this all ticking over. It’s $5 for every mail I send out, which includes a Script (or a similar amount of writing).

I don’t send one out every month, and I tell folks what I’m sending in advance, in case it’s of no interest.

Anyway – you can upgrade here.

Thank you. I’m amazed to see how many people who do this, and it’s appreciated.

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Talking about Christmas gifts, Katie reminds me that there’s some copies of the gorgeous The Wicked + the Divine covers book in stock.

You can get either edition in the US here.

You can get it in the rest of the world here for the standard version or the deluxe.

Will I remember to do a Christmas guide this year? Maybe. Will it happen while it’s still use to anyone thinking of giving presents? Of course not, you silly goose.

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Actually, it really is Christmas Season already.

Alex Segura interviewed a whole lot of folks for Marvel’s Mastering the Art of Comics, which is a guide to how WFH comics is done, in lots of ways. I was one of them. I’ve forgotten what I told him, so looked it up. I said a lot, perhaps surprising no-one.

Anyway, out now – go nose. I’ll be interested to see what everyone says when I get my copy.

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• I love Rachael Smith’s Nap Comix, originally done when her child Henry was napping, and now continuing into his early waddling life. The Kickstarter for the collected edition of his second year of life is currently in progress, and well worth your time.

• I guess I’m going to be just linking to Tom’s writing on Horror Sequels every week for October. All of them have been great, but his piece on Dan Bannon’s Return Of The Living Dead is especially great, and talking about Tom’s own Crohn’s disease, Bannon’s and its influence on Alien and everything else.

• Chatting to Tim Clare on the socials, led to him linking to Nate Crowley’s piece on Chekov’s Gundark, which is Crowley putting a name on the technique of allusive worldbuilding by omission. As in, referencing something you will never explain further to enchant the universe. It’s common in comics, partially born that space is so tight in the medium. It’s one of the backbone’s of Morrison’s technique, for example.

• Did I forget that all the Lone Wolf choose-your-own-adventure books are available for free online before? Maybe, but that just means I get to link go them all again.

• You may have heard of the reading group book scams which are targetting writers. Here’s a great article digging into them, who runs them and how they work. The trick to avoiding them tricking you is lowering your self-esteem to the point where any mail writing to you saying they love your work is viewed with active suspicion.

• I laugh, between the time of me writing that and sending this mail out, I’ve just got one.

• Another good Mindless Ones this week – short, sharp bursts of thought, climaxing in the 30-years-too-late realisation of what’s off with King Mob’s too-sexy-shirtlessness.

• And another good Indirect Market – specifically, what a bad ending teaches you about selling comics. The section where Schatz is in his first job and worried about losing his first job over folks’ response to Civil War is very real.

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It’s been a good week, actually – maybe even workwise too. Sunday involved me going into the Smoke for an afternoon at a theme park with the family and friends, then moving across London to have an actual Grown Up Meal with a small group of comic peers, and then back. I’ve been extremely isolated, in terms of comics folks, so the basic level of orientation you get from being around people who actually get what you’re doing is something else. Four Old Fashioneds also helps.

I just finished the third script for one of the Work For Hire things I’m doing, which is as good an excuse as any to give an overview of what I’m up to there. The thing which I keep on thinking is how strange the order of these have been, in terms of when they started – and when they’re happening.

I won’t give exact dates, but the projects are basically coming out the opposite direction.

So Alien vs X-men is coming out first (in fact, is already), and was last to be started work. The next one (let’s call it project 2) is coming out next (late spring 2027) and started being talked about just before Project 1. Project 3 started earlier than Project 2 (in fact, me doing the first script of Project 3 and it being so much fun, led to Project 2) but is coming out after Project 2. And Project 4 started even earlier than Project 3, and is coming out… well, this is where it breaks down. I think it’ll come out before Project 3, but not by much, and it may end up being the other way around, as its release isn’t finalised.

Honestly, having this much runway is just nice. It feels very grown up. I almost feel like a novelist, except without my family respecting what I do.

(I joke. My family are great.)

As well as that, there’s the next Creator Owned thing – the bible is with the artist, who is starting to explore things. This is what this post was about.

Very serious!

I may write a take of the first issue even before we nail down certain specifics, to get the shape of it. Like a lot of my CO work, I know the opening gambit, beat by beat. I also know I have two big plotting things I should do first, so will likely get at least one of them wrapped first – especially as I’ve just discovered I have more runway than I thought. Which is another advantage. I feel in a blessed state at the mo, in being to able to do the world. C did say to me when talking about some of the new projects above, it’s as excited as she’s heard me about something for quite a while, which speaks to the fun of it.

Plus the Power Fantasy, whose return issue 17 just got handed in to Image. Some minor things to decide, but Caspar has issue 22 in his hands. With him on 8 weeks deadlines, that also means I should plot the next arc of The Power Fantasy at some point (er) in the next 7 weeks.

Then there’s the Scions, which I’m working on as and when I get a chance. While I still need to get the Galactic Tarot wrapped up in its basic form (basically the game content), I started writing some Player Guide stuff – which is very much in the “not really stuff you need for an initial playtest release”. Here’s its opening…

...which does make me smile. I’m deciding tone a whole bunch with this thing, in that it is a game which can work in a serious register, for this kind of player facing material, I’m certainly leaning into the ridiculous joy of it. I’ve started to describe it as inspired specifically by that 1988 period where Warhammer was absolutely feral and anything was possible.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
21.10.2026