Hey guys, it’s Scott.
And it is Tuesday, December 27th. We are completely Christmas cookie’d out at our house. It was a tremendous amount of fun with the boys, even when it was a lot.
When you have three kids, by the third kid, you know don't get any toys for the little guy that makes noise. But he got a karaoke microphone and he got a little keyboard and all kinds of stuff that amplifies the sounds he makes around the house, which is both hilarious and also totally frustrating at times. But it was a joy to see him come down the stairs with the other two in their matching pajamas. And the big gift this year was a batch of tickets to the Yankee games. I know, if you hate the Yankees, I'm sorry. But we got partial season tickets for a whole host of games against teams that we're excited to see them play and defeat because they're going to be awesome this year, of course they are.
And a couple of funny gifts. I got Emmett a poster. He's a huge Stranger Things fan and I got it signed by Joseph Quinn, the guy who plays Eddie and it looks like a 1980s rock poster that says The Upside Down Tour.
Got a couple of good 1980s shirts for Jack, our oldest. We got him, because he loves Robocop, one that says OCP Enterprises Detroit, MI. We got each other Nakatomi Christmas Party 1988 shirt, things like that.
So it was a great time. My parents came up, it was really low key and heartwarming. And I hope whatever situation you're in that you had a good day on Christmas or Hanukkah, anything that you celebrate. I know this season can be very hard and I've certainly had years where the holidays have exacerbated tough times, depression, economic woes, anxieties and all that I just want you to know we're all thinking of you at Best Jackett.
But let's get to your questions, because we'll do this Two Question Tuesday format, we'll keep it going, right? I might even answer three, Ty gave me three good ones.
xXUnderGroundXx asks “Is it possible to get a comic published with a traditional indie publisher (Image, Dark Horse, Avatar Press, etc.) if you haven't published anything before or do you need to have some credentials before they'll deal with you?”
It depends on the company. I mean, the big ones like DC, Image, generally your odds aren't great about getting something published there if you don't have any credentials whatsoever. Like I didn't have any comic work, but I had a short story collection published by Random House when I got my first work at DC. They're usually looking for some background in published writing or playwriting or screenwriting or TV writing, just something that you can show them and say that you've had some accomplishments. Some of the smaller companies—Scout, Avatar Press, I don’t think Valiant takes submissions but I'm not sure (forgive me Valiant if you do).
Essentially what they're gonna look for from you, if you're a writer, is not just a writing sample, you don't want to just send them a pitch, basically all of them are not interested in that. They want to see a full creative team and they want to see art samples. If you're an artist, they do look at your samples, but as a writer, they don't. So what they're gonna want is a pitch for the project with sample pages. I think I went over pitching and what a pitch format looks like in class, if you want to go to the archive and take a look, that was the class with Will Dennis:
But essentially, what you're going to want to do is provide a really good sampling, as much as you can, probably about eight pages of art. So you're going to want to figure out who you're doing the book with, hire them contractually for the duration of the book, and then produce some pages together to go out and shop it to publishers. That's what they'll look for. So as a writer, you need an artist on board if you're submitting with absolutely no credentials at all.
Adriano asks, “how do you set your priorities for the new year?”
I try and stick to my priorities, honestly. I mean, I have had the same priorities for a long time. I think the best answer I can give to that is that teaching is really the key for me to maintain the priorities that I really believe in. Teaching keeps me young and it keeps me attached to the ideals that I try to instill in you guys. I’d feel hypocritical if I say to you, “well go write your own favorite story and be fearless as a writer.” Essentially, the twin pillars of the class are 1) write the story you'd like to find more than any other one today; and 2) always try to be the most exciting writer to yourself. If I don't go home and do those things, then I can feel in my gut that I'm doing the wrong thing as a writer. So for me, teaching reconnects me to my priorities, and I'm grateful to you guys for giving me the chance to do it.
All right, one last one. Why not, right?
DCNation211 asks, “what was the most challenging script you've had to write and why?”
I mean, the most challenging book overall was probably A.D. After Death, only because I was so terrified of going back to prose and I had such negative memories of my last time doing prose.
I was writing a novel under contract, as I've told you guys before, and I knew it had to be a bestseller if they were ever going to pay me, or something that could be a bestseller. And a lot of that was just in my own mind, but it was a negative experience when I got away from it and got into comics. So the scariness of going back to prose was really difficult, and Jeff was a really good partner on that.
But I think the overall most challenging experiences probably Justice League, because it was double ship (and was the first time I’d done so).
James Tynion IV and I wrote it together, and we were coming off the fun and the success, the surprisingly mega success, of Metal for us. So there was a joy and kind of bonkers feeling to it where we really wanted to go maximalist, but the double ship made it so that you had to write out of order constantly, and that was hard. I mean, there's a big challenge to keep emotional threads straight, and I'm really proud of the job that we did, but keep them straight when you had to keep jumping back and forth. Writing double ship is never something I'd like to do again.
But that series, one of the other challenges of it, was that it was linked to so many things that DC needed at that time, like at its core is very, very personal series. It was Lex Luthor believing that he’d unlocked the key to humanity's evolution into predators and that that was what we were supposed to be, that we were supposed to be this space predator. It connected to all of his anger at Superman—he knew that humanity deep down should have been something greater, should have been something scary, should have been something more dominant in the universe, and he now had the key to that.
And it tied together with the moment in politics from 2018-2019 when there was an argument about being your worst self, that bad guys win and all of that stuff. And so I really loved it and it was it was personal, but we also had to do Year of the Villain and the series did well enough that they wanted to connect it to all this other stuff. And the very last thing we did with it was that they wanted us to really end it in a way that cliffhung it to Metal. That's the only thing I looked back at there are only a couple things in my entire time at DC that I look back at and think maybe I would do it differently if I could go back and do it now. And I don't know if I would, honestly, but there's part of me that wishes I had closed the book on a happy note and then just done Metal almost separately and not used it to springboard to Metal so that it had its own closed book.
On the other hand, it drove the sales on Death Metal very, very high. I mean, again, we were really grateful and very pleasantly surprised by the sales on Metal and the momentum from the stuff we were doing on Justice League helped, so I'm on the fence. But that series, because of the double ship and because of the amount of heavy lifting it had to do for DC, as fun as it was, and as much as there are moments in it that I'm as proud of as anything I've ever done—the Superman punch, getting to know and work with Jorge, my relationship with Francis…
…there was also the Hall of Justice and the Hall of Doom literally fighting as giant spaceships, the symbol of Justice, the symbol of Doom, all of the forming one totality, Perpetua, all those things I'm deeply, deeply proud of. But the format was hard. That format does not lend itself to any kind of rational thought jumping all around writing Script #1, Script #3, then Script #2, then Script #5, then Script #4. It's really discombobulating. Anyway, all right, talk to you guys soon!
S
Newsletter #111: Three(!) Question Tuesday