A Sense of Doubt blog post #2063 - COMIC BOOK SUNDAY - our presentation on Comics as a Vehicle for Social Change and various newsy bits
23 DAYS - daily countdown to election day
Just a quickie with our presentation video from Thursday and a bunch of newsletter content as I am working on a big post for tomorrow.
Lots of comic book nerdy stuff here. It's COMIC BOOK SUNDAY.
ENJOY.
October 8: Comic Books as a Vehicle for Anti-Racism
Presented by Chris Tower and Abbie Leavens
Like everything else in America, comic books have a history of perpetuating racist stereotypes and fostering implicit bias, and yet since the 1960s, comic books have worked to be a vehicle for social change and currently are trying to be a truly anti-racist art form. What is anti-racism? How can art forms like comic books effect social change?
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It’s been a while. Well, as we’ve all been saying for the past six months – it’s a pandeeeeeemic. *waves at everything* I have my excuse.
At the end of last month, I decided to go off social media for a bit – couple of weeks, maybe a month. We’ll see. 30th September was four years since I quite smoking. I figured it was time to make another little change. For the next little duration, this will be my base of operations. I’ll probably pipe these updates to Twitter via auto-posting, but other than that, I won’t be on there, or on Facebook or Instagram.
I was reading something about weaning yourself off negative habits, and it made a point of how it’s easier to not do something if the option simply isn’t available than to have it available and then spend your willpower resisting the temptation. This is one of those things.
Notes (Part 1)
A lot happened in the last four months, work-wise, so I’d rather not try and enumerate everything. But in the interest of this place being my primary location for announcing things, here’s some of what’s new and coming up:
John Constantine: Hellblazer Vol. 1 – Marks of Woe was released recently, containing the Sandman Universe Presents: Hellblazer Special, along with John Constantine: Hellblazer #1-6, and Books of Magic #14. I lettered all of these, except for the Books of Magic issue, and it’s not too shabby sharing a book with Todd Klein. Hellblazer’s particularly dear to me, not only because of the character, but also because I got to develop an interesting style here, that I see as my homage to Tom Orzechowski.
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The Department of Truth #1 dropped on 30th September, from James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, myself, Dylan Todd and Steve Foxe, only a couple of days after the Previously Untitled Simmonds Project. The reception on both was ecstatic, it’s safe to say. Also announced was the fact that Elsa Charretier would be drawing our first guest issue – #6.
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Coffin Bound #7 is out this Wednesday, from Dan Watters, Dani, Brad Simpson, Emma Price, and me. A 40-page formal experiment, this was a ton of fun to letter, and you’ll see why when you read it.
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The Legend of the Swamp Thing Halloween Spectacular is out tomorrow, and I have two stories in it, with Ram V, Mike Perkins and Andy Troy. AIPT Comics has a full credit list along with a preview of the first story. One of the reasons I like working with DC is getting to do title cards, and you can see I had fun with this one.
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Blue in Green, with Ram V, Anand RK, John Pearson and Tom Muller, will be out at the end of this month – the 28th, to be exact. This is a book the whole team is incredibly proud of. I’ll probably write a process post about hand-lettering my second graphic novel in the upcoming weeks, maybe timed with its release.
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Home Sick Pilots, with Dan Watters, Caspar Wijngaard, and Tom Muller, was also announced recently. I believe it’ll start serialisation in December. Dan’s a writer I always feel I’d be a huge fan of if I wasn’t working with him (I’m still a huge fan, but don’t tell him that – it’s unprofessional), and once again, this feels exactly the kind of book I’d want to be reading, especially paired with Caspar, his Limbo partner, and his amazing neon-soaked vision of the 90s.
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Giga, with Alex Paknadel, John Le and Rosh will begin serialising this month after a long time in the works. So much work has gone into this book, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it. A meditation on our relationship with technology and civilisation, in the form of a giant mech story.
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An upcoming project with Deniz Camp and Stjepan Mihaljevic just got a publisher. Hopefully we’ll be announcing it soon. This has also been in the works for a long time, and while the concept will sound like a twist on familiar territory, you haven’t read anything quite like this, I assure you.
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Also announced was The Picture of Everything Else, with Dan Watters and Kishore Mohan, from Vault Comics. Dan’s writing a strange, dark sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Kishore’s painting the whole thing in watercolours. Cannot wait to get stuck in on this one.
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Finally, Waning Publishing, the French publisher for a few of the books I’ve worked on, announced my participation as their stretch goal on reaching the €200,000 mark on their crowdfunding campaign for the upcoming graphic novel, Astra Mortem. I’ve never lettered in French (though I’ve lettered in German and a few Indian languages), and it should be an interesting experience.
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Books
Before my break, I had a continuing thread on Twitter on the books I’ve been reading. Figured it makes sense to continue it here. Since the appeal there was to summarise an impression within 280 characters, I’ll try to keep my notes on each book as short as possible.
The Truth About Stories – Thomas King: Not a writing guide as the title might suggest, but a series of lectures by Thomas King about storytelling and about how stories help maintain systems and perceptions, all narrated from a Native American perspective. Wonderfully told, with sensitivity, humour, and stuffed with wisdom. Each lecture begins and ends the same way, but takes you to entirely different places in between.
Mud and Starlight: Interviews with Alan Moore by Pádraig Ó Méalóid. These are mostly all reprints of interviews you might have read online, but it’s handy having them in one place. These are all specifically about Moore’s writing, rather than his views on magic (which I often find more interesting), so they do sometimes feel a bit fannish, but they’re mostly smart and incisive, and Moore is his usual delightfully roguish and trenchant self (even though the “Last Interview” remains an uncomfortable read for various reasons).
Neonomicon – Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows: After wrapping up Providence, I felt like I should read the whole story from the beginning, so I read “The Courtyard” (the original prose short rather than the comics adaptation) which is an electric piece of writing, thrumming with the potential that led to this and Providence. This is a weird beast, though, because it’s definitely important in the context of Moore’s HPL writing, and it’s quite deliberately unpleasant, and it has Moore’s usual heft behind it, but one can’t help but feel some of it is gratuitous (the sexual violence, in the main). Moore speaking about The Killing Joke says that one can put the work in, but some characters simply don’t have the gravity to support that sort of seriousness. This comes close, but I personally still quite like it, and feel it lands on the right side.
Notes (Part 2)
I mentioned this on Twitter a few weeks ago, but it bears repeating. I’ve been getting a bit tired of the grind of lettering all the time. I love the work, but the deadlines can be brutal, and I find I don’t always get the time to recharge that I’d like.
In that spirit, I’m going to be cutting down on my lettering work, give myself more time to spend with family and friends, and also work on personal projects. One part of this is writing, of course, which I’ve been doing for a while now, and the other part is type design.
Not only do I want to work further on comic-book fonts, and launch a proper store at some point, so I can generate passive income which would enable me to continue working on fewer books and do better work, I also actually like type design, and want to gain a bit more knowledge in that arena. So far, everything I know about type is scattershot, learnt via practice and accident. I want to formalise that a bit, so I can both come to my work with a better understanding of the letters I work with, and expand my area of engagement with type.
Particularly with type design, I think it’d be fun to share the process of the fonts I’m working on here, so you can look forward to that.
I’ll hopefully be back next week with a more substantial edition, with a central essay like I usually have.
Have a good week!
From the Commonplace Book
I can’t remember where I found this one, but it’s from Liber Null, a book about chaos magic (that I haven’t yet read myself). In the spirit of Moore, seems like the analogy works for art as well:
The tendency of things to continue to exist, even when unobserved, is due to their having their being in Chaos. The magician can only change something if he can ‘match’ the Chaos which is upholding the normal event. This is the same as becoming one with the source of the event. His will becomes the will of the universe in some particular aspect. It is for this reason that people who witness real magical happenings at close range are sometimes overcome with nausea and may even die. The part of their Kia or life force which was upholding the normal reality is forcibly altered when the abnormal occurs. If this type of magic is attempted with a number of people working in perfect synchronisation, it works much better. Conversely, it is even more difficult to perform in front of many persons, all of whom are upholding the ordinary course of events.
Filed under #magic and #writing.
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Hullo.
D14
Words
Links
Colours
Zoe
Byyyyeeee!!!
****
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DIE 14 drops. Penultimate issue of the most WicDiv-y arc of DIE, and does what a penultimate issue tends to. After all the structure and history of the last couple of issues, this goes right at it. Everything to play for.
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Isn’t Sana Sakeda’s cover just lovely?
***
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Very much back in interview season, as you’ll see in the links below, but I think this one at CBR needs highlighting, as it’s another big one about Eternals, where I talk about a bunch of stuff I haven’t talked about before. Random quote…
“One of Kirby's original ideas was, “The Celestials arrive. They made 100 Eternals and a hundred Deviants and then left.” That's the core creation myth, and I forget who originally wrote this line, but the Deviants are a species of one. They're all individuals. They're rapidly changing. They bred enormously, and there're millions of them.
So, one of my ideas for the Eternals is they've never bred. There's only ever been a hundred of them. In Marvel history, it’s been described as generations of Eternals. So, they get rebooted often, but they've always been. They've just been in stasis. There’s familial relationships, but they’re static family relationships. Thena is Zuras’ daughter, but there was never a procreative act which led to her. Each reset allows them to change bodies or looks, but fundamentally there's only ever been a hundred Eternals and that's why they're the opposite of the Deviants. The Eternals are set, and the Deviants change.”
Read the rest here. More art in there too. Fight! Fight!
****
This is a big interview with Jacen Burrows over at TCJ, and just really interesting. Jacen has done a lot of work with interesting collaborators across the last two decades, and due to Avatar always being a little isolated from the mainstream, that perspective isn’t always centred. Go read. He’s been a delight to work with on Marneus.
I was interviewed by The Nation Centre Of Writing on their craft podcast, on the topic of World building. This was a lot of fun to do, and naturally covered a bunch of other areas. World building is one of the things which gets everywhere.
I occasionally play games online as part of the Gauntlet gaming community, and I ran a game of Heart back in April. Er… I only got around to editing it and adding a title page this week. All three episodes are here in a playlist, for those who like such things. Heart is a game about exploring a chaotic and monstrous living underworld beneath a mile-high city, and it’s a lot of fun.
I am in awe at these covers for Sheba Blake’s classic books line, in many ways.
This Judith Butler interview was strong in lots of ways. Just not having it.
****
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Stephanie’s anatomy of her colours in DIE is fascinating, as a portal into how she works. There’s also gradients if you click through.
****
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I just saw Avery Hill tweet my short three word take about The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood, because my full one is TOO LONG FOR TWITTER. This is that.
"The best debuts radiate an energy born of the knowledge that they may also be a creator's last work. This is that, to the nth degree, incandescent with the excitement of having a stage, the fear that they will lose it and the wisdom to know that life is more than that stage. Inspiring, beautiful, human."
****
I was actually away from home last week, and only back to work this week. An actual break, which never works out like that. There’s always some plate spinning. And, just because I’m not working, doesn’t mean my head is going places, prompted by whatever and wherever I am. We were driving a lot, and basically went through most of The Fellowship Of The Rings audiobook. Audiobooks are unusual for me so approaching a formative text for both me and C in a different format was interesting. Partially it was the fact neither have read it properly for 20 years, while having seen the movies a bunch – the familiar-unfamiliarity of elements which had been taken different ways. Partially is that the narrator’s even pace means I’m forced to linger at places where my eyes would move on – I am very much a song-skipper, so sitting and listening to the lyric sections being sung at me made me think intensely on its purpose. In many ways, Lord of the Rings and Phonogram aren’t that far away from one another – the world is hidden in the songs.
Perhaps this inevitably led to game thinking rather than comic thinking, from various angles. Part of this is necessary, and fruitful. I managed to wrestle down the Master in the DIE RPG to a state which I think I can write up fairly simply. For those who haven’t nosed at the Beta, while the five other classes are in a developed state, the Master (solely played by the GM) is much more a sketch. The Master is mainly off-stage, so less essential, which meant as long as it does the reality-warping GM-mage thing, it’s fine to release. The problem in developing him further was twofold – partially that each class is to feel fundamentally different (and so five sets of ideas have been taken, which I won’t repeat, so limiting options) and partially that as the Master has been off-panel in the comic, the second-to-second reality of the Master is less solid in my head. How does Mastery work? I know it’s the push between playing by the rules and cheating, the nature of GMs and so on. So what does that actually look like?
In short: I have something which should work, so I’ll get it ready for a playtest and a 1.4 beta release at some point. This will also allow you to run another class as an antagonist now, because the Master being playable by players is 100% necessary to allow that. And more stuff. Only a little, but some.
That can wait for another time. Stephanie’s pages for DIE 15 have just uploaded into the dropbox and I need to do a lettering pass on the script so I can settle in and read Fraction/Dodson’s Adventureman 4, which is out today and needs my attentions as soon as possible.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London.
7.10.2020
New Sweet Tooth, The End of Gideon Falls and more.
JEFF LEMIRE
Been a busy month for me as I finished up the art for the fourth issue of the new Sweet Tooth series and I've also been working on scripts for the third and fourth episode of the Essex County TV show. I've also been working on a music video for one of my musical heroes and a true cultural icon...but I can't spoil that yet! More next month.
But here's what's going on that I can talk about...
SWEET TOOTH: THE RETURN
The new Sweet Tooth series is coming out in November and the final order date for comic shops is Oct 11. So if you're in your comic shop and want a copy be sure to pre-order. Every pre-order helps, so I really appreciate it.
And if it's any extra incentive, check out the variant cover to issue #1 by the legendary JIM LEE!!
GIDEON FALLS: THE END
Gideon Falls is ending with issue 27. The story just weaved its way to a natural conclusion, but we wanted to go out with a bang so the final issue will be 80-PAGES LONG! Andrea really outdid himself on this one and I think his work is going to blow some minds.
He and I have already started discussing our next project, so more Lemire/Sorrentino to come. And it would not shock me if we returned to the world of Gideon Falls one day too.
ASCENDER
Ascender is rolling along. Issue 14 hit this week and I just did my lettering pass on issue 15. Here's a sneak peak at some art from the next issue by Dustin...
THE WORLD OF BLACK HAMMER
Skulldigger and Skelton Boy is finally back in action after the Covid shut down. And the next BH series will be BARBALIEN: RED PLANET written by the talented Tate Brombal drawn by Gabriel Walta and colored by Jordie Bellaire. Here are some links to an interview with Tate and I about the new book...
https://comicbook.com/comics/
And check out the painted covers to the BLACK HAMMER LIBRARY EDITION VOL.2 and THE WORLD OF BLACK HAMMER LIBRARY EDITION: VOLUME 2 by co-creator Dean Ormston
To recap whats's coming in the Black Hammer Universe...
2020
SKULLDIGGER + SKELETON BOY Art by Tonci Zjonic
BARBALIEN RED PLANET co-written by Tate Brombal with art by Gabriel Walta and Jordie Bellaire
COLONEL WEIRD: COSMAGOG Art by Tyler Crooke
And in 2021 we will have a new ongoing series starring Lucy Weber as the new Black Hammer, as well as two more BH series featuring an incredible cast of creators that I can't wait to reveal. (Chip Zdarsky, Scott Snyder and Mariko Tamaki may among them. Shhhh!)
SOME OF YOUR QUESTIONS
Scott writes...
This book is all done and will be published in the Fall of 2021. Even though it's finished we decided to hold it until after the release of the new Sweet Tooth series just so they were not being released at the same time. It ended up being 250 pages long and it features a talking dog and a map.
I wish I had better news on this series. The truth is there were some personal issues with some members of the creative team and things sort of stalled on this book. Sometimes real life gets in the way of making comics. The 5th issue is done and I know Keith is drawing number six now. So fingers crossed.
Yeah. This is my fault. As I mentioned in previous newsletters I have been thinking a lot about returning to Royal City and doing more stories. At one point I thought I would just augment the existing material with new story pages, but when I worked on that I realized I wanted to do more than just a few new pages. So there is no new story in the HC but I hope to do new Royal City comics at some point in the near future.
I love Flavia's work and we did discuss a project at one point, but as I worked on the story I decided it was a project I wanted to draw myself and it will actually be the next book I draw after Sweet Tooth. But I would love to work with Flavia one day.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2010.11 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1927 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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