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This week we’re turning off the paywall so Luke can tell you about some things he learned while working on his translation of Jean Pleyer’s sci-fi graphic novel The Children of Light. (Coming out this Tuesday, August 18th, and currently available for pre-order!)

After that, we’ve got a joint recommendation for something we’ve been into lately: An article about a short humor piece being adapted into a feature film. (Note to all the big shot Hollywood producers who read this newsletter: Yes! The rights to Luke and James’ piece, Fragments from the Ancient Gospels of “The Church of a Pretty Good God” are still very much available!)

A Few Things Luke Learned About Humor Writing From Translating a Sci-Fi Comic

Luke here! The Children of Light is one of the most unique comics I’ve ever encountered. A brief plot teaser: "In the far reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy, a supernova obliterates the homeworld of the Zors, an advanced alien race. But the Zors knew this particular apocalypse was coming. To escape destruction, they built a world-sized spaceship run by an omniscient supercomputer. They search for a new home, but the odds are bleak. Aboard the ship, major unrest amongst the crew and passengers endangers the mission."

The Children of Light (CoL) has gorgeous illustrations, deeply compelling worldbuilding, and some particularly striking resonances with our current historical moment. When I first read it in French, I immediately hoped I’d be lucky enough to get the assignment to translate it into English. (The backstory behind Jean Pleyer’s creation of this comic is also incredible—you can read all about it in the supplemental materials in the back of this new edition.)

Now as excited as I was when I found out I’d be able to take on this translation project, I must admit I was also a little apprehensive about tackling a piece of science fiction. As newsletter readers know, most (though not all) of my work involves humor writing. Even my previous translation, Masters of the Nefarious, was a piece of highly absurd comedy. Working in the sci-fi genre would take me out of my comfort zone. (For example: I wound up having to research a bunch of science terminology—I am by no means a science guy!) But as I got into the translation, I was surprised, and comforted, to realize that there’s more overlap between humor writing and sci-fi than you might expect.

Suspension of Disbelief

Suspension of disbelief is one of the cornerstones of both science fiction and humor. Your reader gives you an enormous amount of leeway to drop them into worlds that are quite different from our own. The need to suspend disbelief is very apparent in a story like CoL, which is entirely focused on an alien civilization, but it also happens in humor—and it happens so often that you might not even realize that you are suspending your disbelief! Take the Simon Rich piece Guy Walks Into a Bar. It’s so obvious that it barely seems worth saying, but in order for the piece to work, the reader has to be okay with the fact that genies exist in the world of the piece. In my piece, Could I Be Using My Time Machine More Effectively?, the reader has to accept that the extremely dumb narrator was able to invent a time machine. There are many many more examples I could cite here—suspension of disbelief is fundamental to a huge number of humor pieces.

Base Reality

Connected to suspension of disbelief is the idea of base reality—that is, what is considered normal within the world of your sci-fi story or humor piece. CoL is written from an entirely alien perspective. There’s no human audience surrogate character to guide us through the world and explain things to us. The alien perspective is what is normal within the context of the comic. Similarly, Jack Handey’s What I’d Say to the Martians takes place in a world where martians exist and the narrator has been captured by them. There’s no real sense of surprise about the fact that martians exist, that’s just the setting that needs to be established in order for the piece to work.

Along those lines, when writing my piece Frustrating Things That Happen After You Moisturize Your Hands, I quickly realized that basically all the scenarios I was describing would not be a problem if the characters simply put on gloves. I tried to get around this with a joke about how the base reality of this piece is a world in which gloves do not exist. (“By the way, just to clarify—all of these situations take place in a world where gloves don’t exist. So, if you were thinking, Why don’t these people just put gloves on?, there’s your answer, wise guy.”)

How Much to Explain

In both humor and sci-fi it’s crucial to figure out just how much to explain to the reader about your world and characters. In both genres, if you don’t explain enough, you run the risk of the reader getting lost. But if you explain too much it can start to feel too prosaic and exposition-y. What’s more, sometimes when you answer one question a reader might have, that explanation can wind up raising even MORE questions. In It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers, there’s never any explanation for why the narrator loves gourds so much, or any exploration of the character’s backstory. (“I remember the first time I saw a decorative gourd…”) It’s more fun to see the character’s behavior play out than to get an explanation of why the character behaves that way. In CoL, you’re given enough information to get your bearings, but enough is left unexplained to cultivate an atmosphere of awe and wonder.

Heightening

Heightening is, of course, one of the most important things to get right in short humor. And one of the toughest things to get right about heightening is striking a balance where each new heightening move is surprising but not overly random, and is a logical extension of your premise without being predictable. Over the course of CoL, the reader is dropped into increasingly alien scenes and situations, but each new twist is built on everything that was previously established. The book heightens in a way that is quite similar to how the best short humor pieces work.

A Final Plug

I hope you'll consider ordering The Children of Light from your bookstore, comic shop, or library of choice! It's been getting very good reviews:

The Library Journal (in a starred review) says it's "a gorgeously illustrated, thrilling and thought-provoking episodic epic sci-fi odyssey unlike anything else in contemporary comics."

The Observer UK calls it "a blazingly colourful work of madcap, intergalactic sci-fi" and describes one image from the book as "surely one of the greatest spectacles in comics."

From Bookmunch: "Recalling nothing quite so much as Jack Kirby at his most grandiose, Children of Light zings between radical strangeness... and elevated cosmic wonders... if intense sci-fi is your bag, we guarantee you will have a thunderously good time"

The Irish Times picked it as one of the best graphic novels of 2026 (so far) and calls out "the sheer energy of Pleyers’s art and his glorious unselfconsciousness as a storyteller."

Finally, the Financial Times says the translation is "expertly done by Luke Burns, especially given the amount of intergalactic jargon." (I particularly appreciate this one, because, yes, that was all really hard.)

Get that order in now!

A Recommendation From James and Luke

James and Luke recommend this New York Times article about Ian Frazier and how it took 36 years for his New Yorker piece, Coyote V. Acme, to go from his typewriter to the big screen. There are some really great behind-the-scenes tidbits in this one, not just about the genesis of the movie, but also about how Frazier wrote the piece, and what it was like submitting humor to The New Yorker back in the day.

Beyond that, this story resonated because it reminded us about the hopeful aspect of being a writer. You put work out into the world, and sometimes, after a while, when you least expect it, it pays off in surprising ways. If you’ve ever had a project in development hell for an extended period of time, or really ANY period of time, you may take some comfort in the fact that the movie finally got made after all those years. (Or you might become even more depressed about how long it takes things to get off the ground— fair!)

We also want to give kudos to Bryan Anselm, the photographer who took the picture at the top of the article, which frames Frazier in hilariously Coyote-esque fashion, as if he’s about to get hit by a New Jersey Transit train. And finally, we also hope it goes without saying that we highly recommend that you read (or reread) Ian Frazier’s original Coyote V. Acme piece!