Futuretakes/Lovecourse
2022? I don't know her
Writer's block is one hell of a drug, and I think I did too much of it last year. Dwelling on that bit of failure (and we're counting it as personal AND professional) isn't doing me any good, so instead, let's kick off 2023 (The Year Of Keeping 'Em Guessing) by doing the most opposite thing to a year-in-review there can be: genuine, non-satirical, and barely researched predictions about the year that will be. That's right, it's time for THE HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS 2023 PREDICTIONS, a.k.a. "The Biggest Challenge To The Notion I Am Correct About Everything Ever Undertaken". LET'S GO
PREDICTION NUMBER ONE: DC COMICS' SHARE OF THE DIRECT MARKET WILL INCREASE SIGNIFICANTLY ENOUGH TO EITHER MATCH OR SURPASS MARVEL COMICS'
Before you say anything else, yeah: there will literally be no way of verifying that one. It is purely vibes-based market analysis, and you will have to trust me on that one, because the hard numbers are, and shall be forevermore, lost to corporate history, as a direct result of years of grousing at Diamond Comics Distributors for not being all that good, and also a global worldwide pandemic.
Still, you can feel it, can't you? Beyond the scattered points of data, including the announcements that Flash and Action Comics were headed to second printings, the tectonic plates in Burbank have finished their shifting and we now have a clearer idea of what the Marie Javins project for DC looks like. Put simply: it is a turn towards extreme populism, placating the loudest and most devoted fanbases with stories designed exactly for them, and using the cachet from that to try and court new fans through new propositions, which go from the Milestone revival to those neat new Sandman spinoffs.
In practice, this means that the new slate of comics, which at last include a new Doom Patrol book, is getting launched through an event penned by perpetual HYBC nemesis Mark Waid, spinning out of a World's Finest run so predictable I called its big end-of-year-one twist on the first fucking issue, despite being exactly wrong on its foreshadowing. As is often the case with these things, the rest of the world is loving it, and I would much rather be reading something at least a little bit challenging. But considering they're putting Tom Taylor on that new "Adult Teen Titans" book, building off of a Nightwing run I also don't really care for? It might be time for me to take the hint. (But, also, Nicola Scott is drawing that book, so it might actually be hot. One can always hope)
But what of Marvel, then? Yes. Exactly. It doesn't really seem like Disney care one way or the other, and once more, our hope to see something genuinely new lies with one J. Hickman. Despite everything, C.B. Cebulski is still the Editor-in-Chief; Spider-Man fans are still nursing an anger deep within themselves that cannot leave them; and, most important of all, Dan Slott is still making bad comics.
PREDICTION NUMBER TWO: WE'RE DUE FOR ANOTHER IMAGE COMICS REVIVAL
Spawn launched in 1993. The Walking Dead launched in 2003. Saga launched in 2012. The ten year or thereabouts cycle is up, and the next Image Comics mega-smash turbo-hit will come out this year, carrying with it a wave of new comics from your favorite creators ready to crack the world in two. Whether that's one of the books that was previewed in Image!, or an actual surprise, I'm not sure yet. But the time is nigh. Keep your ear to the ground, because when it happens it's going to happen fast. You're not ready for it. I'm not ready for it. All I know is, it's happening this year, probably in the summer. Bet on it!
PREDICTION NUMBER THREE: COMICS ON SUBSTACK WILL DIE
Gotta admit this one is a bit of a cheat since it's basically happening already. I told you comics on Substack would fail, I even told you they would deserve to fail, but I didn't think it would happen so fast, and because of something as boring as "the numbers just aren't adding up".
Over at Popverse, genuine journalist Graeme McMillan crunched the numbers and put an estimate for the high watermark of success on the platform at around $300,000 yearly. Divide that by 12, then make the assumption the comic would be sold in a shop at $4 a pop, and all of a sudden that success story turns into 6250 monthly sales. That's "okay business" at a smaller press publisher (it would put you right above Boom's Seven Secrets in the sales chart (I'm using Comichron's April 2022 data for this aside because that's the most reliable data I can use)) and it's "your book is getting cancelled" at anyone bigger. Add in Substack's 10% cut (unless you took that Substack Pro grant, in which case it goes up to 85% in the first year of revenue), and things become a lot less sustainable.
And thus, here we are; left and right, paywalls are being brought down as the high-profile creators of headlines past sign print deals at established publishers. Love Everlasting is an Image book. James Tynion IV is launching his new books at Dark Horse. Comics on Substack, like every other Nick Spencer thing, will end on a wet fart. So it goes.
PREDICTION NUMBER FOUR: AND UPON THE BIRTH OF THE SEVENTH CHILD, THE GREAT CHASM WILL OPEN, AND FROM DEEP WITHIN, THE BEAST WILL SCREAM ITS UNHOLY SONG; THE EARTH WILL BURN AND THE SEAS WILL BOIL; THE REALM SHALL BE PREY TO THE PLAGUE OF THE GREAT WORM
Also: lycans!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: TURNING TO THE SUN, EYES CLOSED AND MOUTH AGAPE, AND WAITING FOR APOLLO TO SPIT
At the risk of sounding too obvious: Kieron Gillen is really good at this. He is so good at this, in fact, that he put the key to understanding Sins of Sinister #1 right there, in plain sight, in the pages of the last couple of issues of Immortal X-Men. Specifically, it's the part where Mister Sinister, the proverbial master of ceremonies for the events to follow, loudly and repeatedly insists that he doesn't want to go through the events of Judgement Day again. (It's a whole thing where he's been manipulating the timeline; if you weren't there for it you're not cool enough for this newsletter)
Judgment Day, as the cool people will recall, was about the moral necessity of change, in the face of the crises our systems of governance are directly responsible for. As a superhero-glam 19th century British Imperialist, Mister Sinister takes issue with the notion, for the very obvious reason that he is a 19th century British Imperialist, and this takes us to the very logical follow-up question that comes up if you've established that a change must happen: what if that notion of change gets co-opted in the worst way possible, by the very people that got us in this mess in the first place?
And so, our issue begins by taking the opening pages of House of X, the biggest moment of change in contemporary X-Men history, and utterly perverting it, in the shape of everyone's favorite gene freak. What follows from there is a ten-year history of future Marvel comics, an all-star buffet of some of the finest comic artists working today in which familiar shapes and stories take a turn for the wholly evil. Here is J. Jonah Jameson, telling ace reporter Ben Urich to stop fighting the system and to give up on the big story. Here are the Fantastic Four, on a dangerous journey to deep space that none will survive. Here is Thanos' crusade, ended before it could even begin anew. The Avengers are at war with the X-Men, for no reason and no purpose but Sinister's agenda.
The stage is set, and, gang: it fucking rocks. Lucas Werneck aces both the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the expressiveness of his figures focuses the story, and its many moving parts, on the emotions of its main character, guiding us through it and keeping things easy to follow. Watching it all fall apart, eventually? That's going to be dope.
I promised you at the onset of this that I wouldn't dwell on the year that was, and I won't; but if you were to ask me which book from a big publisher was the best thing published last year, I would say Detective Comics in a heartbeat. On the basest possible level, it's because both it and Batman are digging into ideas from Grant Morrison's run. But where Chip Zdarsky is going into the big blockbuster ideas (Re-inventing the Batman through an examination of the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh), Ram V is going for something deeper, weirder, and more interesting, especially when put in context with the rest of his work.
As is ever the case, then, this is a story of ideas lingering over time and becoming the structures at the heart of society, of ancient monsters wreaking havoc on the modern world trying to reclaim what is theirs, and the people that get caught up in the middle of it all. But since it's a book that has Batman in it, those ideas exist in the form of ancient conspiracies, zombies, assassin cults full of beastmen, gangsters, Batmen, and the ancient demon Barbatos. And to top it all off, there is an opera motif applied to it all, giving the action a sense of spectacle and an extremely bold sense of lyricism that is more than welcome.
It is all extremely ambitious; and yet, somehow, this is the week when it got even more ambitious. The headline goes like this: Detective Comics #1068 has set the bar for formalist boldness in a comic in 2023 so high that it might just be impossible for any other comic to reach it. You've got two masters of the form, Rafael Albuquerque and Ivan Reis, delivering on your doctor-recommended dose of powerfully moody gothic superhero action. But it goes deeper than that. The issue centers around the duality of Two-Face, and to represent that, nearly every single double-page in the issue is put together so that the layout on one page is mirrored on the other, with each artist drawing a page.
I can't make justice to how miraculous that is; all I can tell you is that, somehow, through deep coordination and sheer mastery of the form, it works. It flows, without calling attention to this incredible fact; Albuquerque and Reis line up the particularisms of their styles in ways that work together every single time. This is a comic so committed to its bit that even its imperfections, the times where it doesn't perfectly line up, work in its favor, as a way to highlight a lack of neatness in Two-Face's condition.
The long and short of it is that this is a wonderful comic. It is incredible. Also: the effect works a thousand times better if you're holding a physical copy, and that means that between this and the whole Comixology mess, I'm vindicated in my belief that this is the best way of enjoying comics. Oh, and guess what? The backups are just as ambitious; the team of Dani and Si Spurrier go for the kinds of neat tricks you'd think would only happen in a smaller book, but nope, it's in the Detective Comics from Detective Comics Comics. Love it to bits! Wish I could say more but this is long enough as is!
And there we go! That's the first newsletter for the year! We're destroying the shit out of the rust! Thank you for your kindness and your trust! Thank you for bearing with us! I'm gonna keep working on making this newsletter better, and in the mean time you're gonna keep working on finding me on the socials, at Cohost and other, worse websites! And once that is all done, you're gonna do what you do, and then, you will HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!