The Foxe Gospel 8/2/22: "...I...I can't read it."
Yelps & Barks
Welcome, folks, to the inaugural installment of The Foxe Gospel, a newsletter I’m launching for a few reasons, none of them wildly ambitious. (No points at all for guessing the name reference; it was either this or Foxe News, which I think would have ended up in many a spam filter.) As this is the first installment, there’s a lot of prelude here. If you don’t really care about all that but thought to yourself, “Hey, I kind of liked [book I wrote], I wonder what else that guy is doing,” just scroll down.
Mostly, this newsletter is a way to add order and consistency to my work schedule, which, over the last few years, has been dictated by a mudslide of deadlines. I am grateful to be busy, but I don’t have a brain naturally inclined toward hanging that busyness on a scaffolding of order and careful planning. A biweekly accounting of what I’m up to, what I’m into, and what I’m onto next is as much a chance to market myself as it is an opportunity to hold myself accountable in the public square, however small that square may be.
Secondly, this is my meager attempt to circumvent the demands of our increasingly hellish social-media landscape. I’ve lamented as much before, but I truly don’t think the internet has ever been worse than it is today, nor as inescapable. For people in my rough age bracket (I’ll be the Jesus death age in December), we were more or less the first generation to grow up alongside widespread, fairly accessible internet access without ever having really known a non-connected world, which also means we’ve witnessed every step in social media’s evolution into the most destructive and invasive species on the planet.
I was a smidge too young for LiveJournal, but was aware of my older friends’ blogs, which I spurned in favor of the flashier Xanga, where I could code auto-playing Tegan & Sara songs over my preteen emotion purges. I navigated genuine real-world conflict over the Top 8 choices of MySpace, and pinned buttons or whatever onto my Facebook wall, way back when the service was a sort of glorified phonebook. I took to Instagram eagerly, and am among the many currently bummed that it’s becoming Worse TikTok against our will. And, finally, I was late to Twitter, succumbing around 2012 when it felt like a vital way to make myself known in comics.
Over the decade that followed, Twitter undeniably helped me become closer with other pros and got me on the radar, however distantly, of editors who’ve gone on to offer me projects or recommend me to peers. Most of that was slow and organic, not the kind of eager networking a lot of newer pros think they’ve got to attempt. Twitter helped me get to know people, and that was a mostly positive experience that sometimes had tangible impacts on my career.
But over the last few years, there’s been a significant shift in how Twitter intersects with publishing, and specifically with comics, a medium where the barrier between fan and professional is often more permeable (or at least perceived to be that way), and where fans who feel a sense of ownership over corporate characters can make their opinions known quite passionately and immediately. And when I say “immediately,” I mean, more often than not, upon reading half of a tweet announcing a project, not after actually reading or considering the books in question.
Time after time, I’ve watched professional friends of mine either fully leave the platform or distance themselves from it, mostly due to the kind of harassment an always-on, instantly connected global platform enables. Especially as comic-book movies and TV shows and video games continue to explode, comic creators are exposed to countless fans who’ve never bought or read a comic but still have very strict opinions about how their favorite multimedia characters should be depicted, and how dare you suggest they should have any familiarity with the source material before making those opinions known to you, sometimes with colorful profanity or borderline threats?
Without exception, this Twitter exodus (or at least reluctance) is not because we have thin skin or can’t take criticism (frankly, the creators with the thinnest skin tend to spend the most time on Twitter, to the detriment of their work, editorial relationships, and our collective sanity), but because the “criticism” is often directed at our race, gender, sexuality, ability status, or other category that makes us an easier target for bigotry in online spaces. When I shared that I was largely leaving Twitter, I saw an account place the blame on X-Twitter, the loose collective of fans and readers who coalesced around the time House of X and Powers of X were published, and have stayed engaged and passionate since. X-Twitter was actually nothing but welcoming and positive to me, and I enjoyed a lot of the interactions that arose from House of XCII coming out.
Instead, the final straw for me was instead the onslaught of hate I received when news went wide that I helped co-create a new gay character for Marvel, debuting in Edge of Spider-Verse #5 at the end of September. I’m extremely proud to be part of the genesis of Web-Weaver (designed by the incomparable Kris Anka), and I can intellectually distance myself from people around the world calling me a groomer pedophile who’s ruining Stan Lee’s legacy, but I can also simply say: enough is enough—no more access for you. I saw one path ahead of me where I stood valiantly defiant in the face of hate…but why? If Twitter is the parcel of land this war is being fought over, the bigots can keep it; it’s a swamp and nothing built there will last. As someone who could most accurately be sorted into the “rising newcomer” category (despite my first comic being published almost a decade ago and over 75 books under my belt), I refuse to have my “brand” become “Righteously Defensive.” I just don’t care enough in that respect—I want to focus on the work.
[And before anyone runs with this as evidence of their own opinions of publisher/creator relationships, responsibilities, and expectations, I’ve been nothing but happy with my Marvel experience so far. My editors have been, across the board, lovely and supportive, and have been doing the best thing I could ask of them in the face of harassment: offering me more work. When I report tweets that literally say, “I am going to find where you live and stop you from writing stuff like this” and Twitter tells me they found no violations of their rules, I feel pretty confident saying the problem is the platform.]
Simultaneously, both anecdotal evidence and conversations with very successful friends and knowledgeable retailers helped break the illusion that there’s any correlation between Comic Twitter and comic sales, which is the main factor keeping many of us tethered to the platform. I know plenty of creators, influencers, and personalities might passionately argue otherwise, but I’ve had Bookscan access; I’ve talked to major retail accounts; I’ve heard from the best and brightest in the industry: there is no correlation.
Frankly, it didn’t even take talking to others to come to that conclusion. If you were to take the temperature of Comics Twitter, Wolverine (Logan) and Batman (Bruce Wayne) are all but obsolete, and unworthy of ever again gracing a mainstream comic book. That their books consistently outsell 90% of the industry, even in the absence of gimmicks or constant relaunches or dedicated sales campaigns, tells another story. I've watched creators with 100,000 Twitter followers fail to sell Big Two books carefully catered to their online audiences, and creators with minimal social-media footprints become breakout mainstream stars. I've witnessed new publishers become Twitter darlings, heaped with praise and reviews and “The Future of Comics” labels while averaging under 10k copies of any given issue, failing to pay creators on time, and leaving their most promising series unfinished.
There is a real danger, I feel, in succumbing to the echo chamber of Twitter, and in taking a small percentage of a small percentage of the reading public as representative of the whole shebang. This is not to say there’s no value in the online conversation, or that it doesn’t aid in the discovery of worthy books and projects, especially from marginalized and rising creators, but the lure of believing Twitter to reflect the real world is a fatal one in my personal experience.
I also miss, desperately, when creators had more of an air of mystique to them. When I was a teenager, stumbling across an interview from one of my favorite writers or artists felt like a rare peek behind the curtains. Now, I can instantly find their opinions on just about any subject that crosses their digital desk (often opinions I did not want or need to know!), and the mythos of it all is lessened as a result. And as a reader who came of age by burning through the Vertigo back catalogue and all that it pointed me toward, both in and out of comics, I worry that something has been lost as we all draw from the same well of online exposure and experience. Part of the magic of reading Morrison and Milligan and Gaiman and Carey and Moore and Pollack and Collins and on and on was being exposed, often for the first time, to the eccentricities gathered within their personal mental libraries, curated over years of lived experience, curiosity, and careful study. With every reference now a lazy Google away, and with so many of us taking in the same trending topics and algorithmically suggested oddities and news stories and memes, a homogeneity starts to set in that deadens my enthusiasm.
Additionally, at the risk of sounding like (more of) a snob, I just don’t think it’s creatively sustainable or productive to take in unfiltered real-time reactions to your work. As a former critic/site runner, I feel very strongly that no one should ever be pressured into liking a comic, or even into not saying negative things about it online. Criticism does not need to be constructive, either—there are few joys in life like a truly scrumptious takedown. Check out Andrea Long Chu on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, or Jeff VanderMeer on Alex Garland’s Men. But the flipside is that, unless a creator has perpetuated real harm with a poorly considered, under-researched, damaging portrayal of an experience outside of their own (which is not, it should be said, the same thing as depicting bad people being bad or doing bad things, even if they’re not held accountable or punished for it within the narrative), I believe creators rarely benefit from taking in social-media criticism.
Everything that makes it to store shelves has already been reviewed by editors, trusted peers, and corporate gatekeepers (not always a bad word!) whose responsibilities include making sure freelancers don’t break any of the toys in the shared toy box. It’s not good for any creator’s mental health to try to parse which tweets to happily acknowledge and which to reject, or to exist in a constant pre-stress over how things will be received, particularly in a medium where steady work often means having things come out on a monthly basis. I have friends for whom every New Comic Book Day is an experience in dread, waiting to see how accounts with 150 followers will respond to their work. This is not productive! This is also, frankly, not how it works in any other medium. For all that Comics seems to collectively nurse an inferiority complex relative to other art forms, we sure like to wallow in our own muck at times. I genuinely think we’d all be in a better place if creators practiced restraint on social media and held more of ourselves back while respecting and making space for readers and critics to react and discuss books freely, without worrying about us swooping into DMs or quote-retweeting to send a wave of hate after anyone who doesn’t like our work.
Finally, stepping outside of the creator mindset entirely, I still think social media is absolutely wretched. I’m sure I’m not the first to make this observation, but Twitter feels very much like the legendary opening line of one of my very favorite novels, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
Social media in general, but specifically Twitter, is what I would consider “absolute reality,” even if much of that reality is distorted or outright false. We, as upright monkeys, are not meant to take in and meaningfully process the amount of information we are exposed to daily on Twitter, especially at such a rapid pace. There is a vast gulf between being thoughtfully aware of what’s happening in the world and being swept under a tide of information we will forget in seconds, or diving into the brackish waters of dramas and controversies that have absolutely nothing to do with our lives. I should not know who Ana Mardoll is or where he works or how he feels about the craft of writing; I simply shouldn’t.
I read a fantastic piece the other day (and of course can’t remember the outlet, author, title, how I found it, or any searchable assortment of keywords) about how the early days of social media were all about carving out personalized spaces, little lockers of digital space we could decorate and use to show off our individuality, invite others to view and interact with it, and do the same in turn. Now, social media is about consolidating the highest possible number of potential consumers on a tiny handful of platforms designed primarily to sell us things we don’t need, or at least expose us to monetized ads for things we don’t need. The rise in use of Discord channels and newsletters and other, more cordoned-off corners of the web, is a response mechanism to a social-media landscape that increasingly less social and more parasitically commercial.
All of which is an incredibly verbose way to say that I want to continue to talk about my work and the work of others that I enjoy, as well as the art and information I’m taking in that help to inform that work, but I have no interest in doing it on Twitter, where any 280-character-chunk of a thought can be taken out of context in seconds, or where a homophobe on the other side of the world with no intention of ever buying a comic book can make sure I see his thoughts and opinions on me any time he pleases.
Subscribers can expect, in future newsletters, to read a lot less about my philosophical stance on social media and a lot more on what I’m working on, what books and movies and music I enjoyed recently, and what to keep an eye out for next. I hope to share a good deal of behind-the-scenes info too, from process steps on Archer & Armstrong Forever to things like annotated Easter eggs in X-Men ’92 and the Spider-Ham books, or what it’s like to balance adult horror work like Razorblades with licensed kids books for My Little Pony and Baby Shark.
My aim is to stay biweekly for substantial newsletters, along with brief updates if a release falls outside of that cycle. Where it goes from here depends on what kind of audience develops, or whether this becomes more of a personal journal that happens to be archived online. I know there are already too many newsletters to count, most of them from creators with much bigger followings than my own, but if this helps me gather my own thoughts and resist the temptation to Log On, it will have served its purpose.
OUT THIS WEEK [8/2/22]:
X-MEN ’92: HOUSE OF XCII #3
Art by Salva Espin
Colors by Israel Silva
Letters by Joe Sabino
Design Pages by Jay Bowen
Main Cover by David Baldeón & Israel Silva
Variant Cover by Mike Del Mundo
Edited by Lauren Amaro & Jordan White
Published by Marvel Comics
XCII OF SWORDS!
Raise your swords! When Apocalypse learns the fate of Krakoa's ancient sister-island of Arakko, it's up to the X-Men to take up arms and save it from the warlord of Polemachus, Arkon the Magnificent! Everyone's favorite X-team of the '90s gets caught up in a realm of blades and magic in this sprawling one-issue crossover!
Woo buddy, the print publishing industry has been struggling since the onset of the pandemic. As many readers (and certainly all retailers) are aware, supply-chain woes have affected the schedules of countless books, and X-Men ’92: House of XCII is sadly no exception, with #2 and #3 being hit with large delays despite all of us being comfortably ahead of schedule. We appreciate everyone’s patience, and, honestly, it’s better it happened between these issues than between the ones to come.
In addition to a very different take on the X of Swords tournament, one more inspired by Mortal Kombat, this issue ends with a surprise pivot concerning the threats facing the ’92 version of Krakoa. Things get ‘90s-tastic in a brand-new (or is it old?) way here!
I’ll do a longer, more detailed reflection on House of XCII once the series wraps, but every aspect of this book has been such an immense joy, especially working with Salva, who drew over 150 characters over the course of these five issues. You want cameos? We got cameos!
IRRATIONAL TREASURE (A DUMB & DUMBER ORIGINAL STORY)
Illustrations by Shadia Amin
Edited by Michael Petranek
Published by Scholastic
Go on an epic adventure with Harry and Lloyd—the stars of the hit Dumb & Dumber franchise—as middle school students, in this hilarious illustrated novel!
Despite their exhausted history teacher’s best efforts to get them excluded, middle-schoolers Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas join their classmates on a special weekend-long trip to America’s capital, Washington, D.C. Shortly after arriving, the boys wander off the guided path at the Museum of American History, where they find a very suspicious-looking security guard seemingly breaking into one of the cases. This doesn’t ring any mental alarm bells for Harry and Lloyd, who are instead excited and fascinated by the case’s contents, even as the security guard tries to hush them up.
Unfortunately, Harry and Lloyd end up setting off the actual alarm bells, and the “security guard” makes a break for it -- but not before dropping a coded map that has certain locations around Washington, D.C. marked with strange symbols. The boys have just one thought: SCAVENGER HUNT! Soon, Harry and Lloyd (and their exasperated classmate Tini) embark on a romp through Washington DC to find everything on this “scavenger hunt,” all while being trailed by the thief who is after the REAL treasure the map leads to.
Part Nicholas Cage heist of the Declaration of Independence, part hilarious middle grade adventure, Irrational Treasure is sure to be a hit of fans of Dumb & Dumber and kids who are new to the franchise alike!
I’ll never forget the shock of getting an email inviting me to pitch on a Dumb & Dumber middle-grade novel but am so grateful I ran with it. My Spider-Ham editor, Michael Petranek, thought my sense of humor might be suited to adapting Harry and Lloyd to preteen misadventures, and I was thrilled when he signed up one of my favorite collaborators in the world, the fabulous Shadia Amin, to provide illustrations throughout. I love, love, love the prose world and hope this is the first of many steps into it for me.
Whether you’re a fan of the original movies or just like goofy middle-grade adventures, Irrational Treasure should be a turkey-gobbling good time.
ON THE HORIZON:
Next Wednesday, 8/10/22, sees the release of Archer & Armstrong Forever #4, the explosive (literally) conclusion to our first arc. I’ll have a LOT more to say after this issue is out, but expect our boys to emerge (if they even do) pretty altered from their experiences in this issue.
The following week, the long-awaited deluxe hardcover omnibus of Razorblades: The Horror Magazine should be in comic shops everywhere. James Tynion IV and I, along with dozens of the most talented horror creators working today, poured our all into these 400 pages, which collect everything from Razorblades #1 through #5 in oversized form, along with a cover gallery. This is one of the physically largest things I’ve ever worked on and it is killing me that I haven’t held it in my hands yet, but soon!
INPUT, OUTPUT:
I’ve been making a concerted effort to get on top of my workload lately, partially because I’ve had very little time to take in anything aside from work research and Drag Race franchises (Monet won that lip sync). But I am finally clawing my way out of the pit I dug for myself.
My nightly ritual this summer has been reserving half an hour to read in the hot tub as the sun sets, and that helped me make good time through The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman and Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn.
View from the Cheap Seats was alternately a welcome palette cleanser (sure, I’ll read about Neil Gaiman waxing poetic on British fantasists from the ‘40s, why not?) and an eerily well-timed encouragement to stick to what matters (craft, work, and inspiration) and discard what doesn’t (the noise). It was, of course, doubly dated at times; some of the collected essays were decades old, and the world of 2016, when this volume was assembled, is somehow also decades in the past already. But I’m glad I finally took it off the shelf, just when I didn’t know I needed it the most.
Islands of Abandonment was something else entirely, and I couldn’t tear through it fast enough. Flyn traveled across the world to various places left abandoned by humans, whether due to nuclear fallout or White Flight or chemical contamination, or simply because the sole family living on a small island eventually grew old and moved way. What she found was yes, the expected damage caused by years of human hubris and unbridled capitalism, but also thriving ecosystems that emerged in our wake. I wouldn’t consider Flyn’s outlook ultimately optimistic for humanity, nor is it an excuse to continue on our current species-wide death spiral, but it was fascinating to learn how regions of the world that are dead to us typically do not stay dead to other life forms for very long. Man-made climate change will likely result in massive die-offs, the likes of which have been seen only a few times in the history of our planet, but there is all likelihood that, on an extended planetary scale, life will continue—just without us, and all the countless species we’ll take with us when we go. I promise the book isn’t a gloomy read, though, and I recommend it to anyone whose daily activities involve at least a little existential despair for the planet.
On the movie front, I was pretty soft on Nope, which I ultimately think was two movies (an excellent horror story centered on Steven Yeun and a barnstorming Spielberg-ian family romp starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) imperfectly sandwiched together. The third act was all spectacle but had fully lost me by that point. Clearly, I am in the minority when it comes to Jordan Peele’s movies, and I’ll be there opening weekend for whatever he does next, but I hope future efforts will show more focus and character work.
More successful for me, and much more limited in its scope, was The Black Phone. An ideal version of this movie would have had about half the runtime—the pitfall of adapting a rather short short story—but Scott Derrickson and crew ably evoked the tone they seemed to be going for, and Ethan Hawke did fine work as The Grabber.
My partner and I also finally got around to Impetigore, the 2019 Indonesian folk-horror chiller from Satan’s Slaves director Joko Anwar. I think Satan’s Slaves is the more successful movie, even if Impetigore showcased a major leap forward for Anwar in staging shots, but we enjoyed it a ton. The opening scene is sublime, and the rest is never less than engaging and inventive. Definitely recommend to Shudder subscribers and/or fans of Conjuring-like spooky supernatural horror. (Despite the title, it's not terribly gory, if that's a sticking point for you.)
Sonically, this Ringer list of the best emo songs of every year since the genre’s inception got me TOGETHER. I was the prime age to catch later waves of emo, even if I never went full scene-kid, but aside from perennial favorites like Brand New and Thursday, I really landed in the pre-2000 side of the genre, with Sunny Day Real Estate, American Football, and the like. I’ve had Rites of Spring on constant rotation since reading this (or as close to constant as possible without exposing my boyfriend to what he would only distantly consider music).
My comic intake has been woeful lately, aside from research reading. I did binge all of Home Sick Pilots, from Razorblades contributor Dan Watters, singular artist Caspar Wijngaard, Department of Truth letterer (and buddy!) Aditya Bidikar, and designer Tom Muller, and it did not disappoint. My dirty secret is that, if I really like the first issue of something, I will usually then wait and read the whole thing all at once, or at least entire arcs at a time. The more I like something, the more I want to savor it, rather than taking it a chunk at a time. I have no idea if the Home Sick Pilots plan was always to stop at fifteen issues, but I easily could have read 15 more. "Neon Genesis Evangelion meets The Shining meets SoCal crustpunks" is a bonkers elevator pitch, but it’s accurate, and it works. The kind of book you’re furious you didn’t think of but also glad you get to enjoy without knowing what comes next. Pick up all three trades and blow through it the earliest chance you get.
Andddddd that’s it for this first too-long installment. I expect future newsletters will be about half this length or less, but I had Feelings™ to purge, and purge them I did. If you’ve made it this far, bless you—I hope I made your DMV wait or toilet break a little less tedious.
Until next time,
-Steve