Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, April 25. Forgive my voice, this is the voice of a tired dad. Quinny has been going through a bit of a nightmare phase, like literal nightmares, and they're all hilarious and ridiculous where he'll just like, yell something out in the middle of the night like, “Let go my waffle, Emmett!” and then I run in there to see if he's okay and then he's already asleep, but then I'm awake and I can't shut my brain back off. So this is the voice of a very tired dad. But things are good. Quinny he turned four. I cannot believe it. This weekend, he's got his birthday party at a bouncy house—indoor playgrounds where I'm sure I'll probably injure my back or neck or something. But I'm very excited for it. He has Mickey Mouse cake (hail Hydra). And yeah, he's just bopping along, man. Our big thing with him is whether or not he's going to need these tubes in his ears. He gets these constant ear infections because of the craniotomy he had when he was six months old due to his skull fusing a little bit early. And so some of the scar tissue makes him more susceptible to those kinds of ear infections. So it's a bit of a drag, just that he's constantly getting these ear infections.
But Jack, our 16 year-old, is getting to the end of his semester. I always joke that like, if I wrote him, you'd tell me I'm being lazy. He is like a very, very wonderfully typical teenage boy in his affections and also his complete disdain for me sometimes. But I love him and he's great. And Emmett is high into baseball season. We watch every Yankees game and he is a wonderful walking trove of statistics. And we throw the ball and he's getting really good, we play pretty much every day after this writers room.
So things are all good here. Just tired. Next week will be the big WGA strike, if it happens. Obviously, I'm hoping for negotiations to go well and that there isn't a strike, but if there is, I'm going to take full advantage of it to get ahead of my comic stuff and also rest my body and brain.
But because it's Tuesday, I thought I do two quick questions for the free post. And then for the paid posts, I was going to continue on the second part of the topic I was talking about last time, which is how to create a sustainable or safe income for yourself as a comic book writer. Last time, we talked a lot about licensed stuff, like what are the best ways to try and make a living if you're doing DC or Marvel or IDW or Valiant or those kinds of things. And this week, I'm going to talk a little bit about indie comics, and some of the ways not just to make money or get paid month by month, but to try and create some kind of floor or safety net financially for yourself through the world of comics, okay? So again, you can always sign up for the paid part, it's just $7 a month. For that price, you get all of the posts that we've done in the past, plus every single class that we've done.
Our class is going to be May 3rd this time. We've got some great materials, and we're going to be talking a little bit about scope and structure. I think it'll be a lot of fun. But you get all of our past classes, like all 15 to 20 of them, and you get to skip lines at cons with me, and you get to send your books in to get signed for free and all that if you pay shipping. So I definitely feel like it's a bargain and I'm always hopeful that you guys will give it a shot!
But for the free post, two things. Somebody asked me last time about rejection. And it occurred to me that I talked a little bit about rejection in terms of the starting out phase of your career.
And I did mention that you'll always be rejected, you'll do stories that people don't like. But there's also like, a phase of rejection as a pro that can be really hard to deal with. And I just wanted to tell you like, a moment in my career where there was a real feeling of rejection and how I adjusted to it. Because my hope is that you see that it's not all support. It's not all easy. It's not all everyone loves what you do and that stuff all the time at all. And it's a good thing that it's not. And then I'll move over and do the paid post. So the time that I felt the most rejected, or the time that I dealt with rejection, I think, that really was the most difficult for me, came right around 2012/13. It was right as we were finishing Death of the Family on Batman.
So at that time, I was still in a phase where I was intensely insecure all the time. I really felt like even though Court of Owls had done extremely well for us, that I didn't deserve the job. It was really hard for me to write that book at that time. The stress of it was causing a lot of problems for me in my personal life and all of that. Like I've said it before, it was like being given your dream job before you felt like you were ready for it and you couldn't turn it down and at the same time you didn't feel prepared. So I was already a pretty nervous wreck of a guy. But I was really, really proud of the first two stories we had done. And I was friends with Greg now, we really were getting along. I felt we had something special.
And I was just getting my confidence and I felt like the next thing we would do, we had been asked for a while to do the origin of Batman for the New 52. And I had kind of refused because I felt like Year One was always the sacred origin. But then there were all these things that had changed, peripheral characters like Jim Gordon and Batgirl and Selena and all kinds of stuff, so that there wasn't any way that that could be the origin anymore. And there was sort of an indication that if we didn't do it, somebody else might get a chance to do it as a separate book. And so I decided I was gonna dive in, and I had this big plot for Zero Year in my head. But I knew there'd be a backlash announcing we were going to redo the origin. And I was sort of prepared for that. But it was important to me to do it. I've talked about it before, but I wanted to do an origin that would speak to my kids about Batman, make Batman brave in the face of things I thought they had to face that I hadn't had to as a kid. Year One and Dark Knight Returns put Batman in a city that looked like New York City to me, and had him facing things that like the threat of nuclear annihilation, corruption in the city, and all of this kind of stuff that was there in the miasma of the 80s for me growing up. And so I wanted to do one that felt like it touched on some of those things for my kids.
And so I've said it before, but Zero Year really came to me when my son Jack was young, and he went out to get water in the hallway and they had a active shooter drill in his school. Just a drill, but they didn't realize he was out there and he got locked in the hallways, and then he didn't go to school for the rest of the year without a thermos, he never went to use the bathroom, any of that stuff. And it made me realize quickly how his fears are insanely different than mine growing up. And so Zero Year has coded versions of some of the things I feel like are the most prominent anxieties for him in his generation at that time, at least, from terrorism to gun violence to superstorms to complete social breakdown, all of that kind of stuff, with post apocalyptic imagery and the endless war in the Middle East at that time, all that kind of stuff. So the point is, though, I knew it was gonna get a backlash for doing it, and so I was prepared for that. I was ready to not let anyone see what it was until they opened the first page, and then they saw Batman in his sleeveless, post apocalyptic get-up and realized that it would be something so different than Year One that you almost couldn't compare them. I wasn't doing anything that was expected, and that was the goal.
But what happened was, with Death of the Family, that was the first time I had allowed a larger crossover to happen with our book. When I did Court of Owls, they were all kind of one-shots. But with Death of the Family, there was a lot more tie-ins, there was a lot more Joker stuff on the side. And I looked them over in terms of what the basic nature of each one of those was just to make sure Joker was consistent. But the goal was to let people really use the Joker in the way they saw fit in their story. I've always tried to give people enough elasticity with whatever sort of crossover elements they use that it benefits their story and isn't sort of top-down dictation from me. So I wasn't paying a tremendous amount of attention, but they went over well, people were happy with them. And so I remember vividly being at a summit in North Carolina for DC and then having the last issue come out of Death of the Family, and I'd worked so hard on it. I remember just going over it a million times, all the dialogue. I do that with like all endings, but I was being really nervous going over it. And then seeing the review start to come in and getting some of the best of my career, being really excited, and then driving home from this summit in the rain. And I remember I had done the drive down to North Carolina, so I was driving up. It was like a fun long, multi-day drive. And all of a sudden, I start getting all these notifications on my phone about “I hate you!” “You're the worst writer ever!” “I can't believe I spent my fucking money on this and this!” And I remember actually pulled over to just be like, what the hell's happening? And again, the critical reviews were pretty great and the initial response had been good, but then there was this like, wave of anger at me, and I didn't understand what it was about, honestly.
And it turns out, what I hadn't paid any attention to is the fact that people were buying multiple, multiple books, like they were buying all the tie-ins. And so they expected there to be big ramifications from the story. For me, the story was an emotional one and the ramifications were the breaking up of the family and a new look at the Joker and Batman. And I knew in my head that it was going to be, because we had been okayed now to stay on Batman for a while, probably the first part of a two-part story (Comedy and Tragedy) where the second part, Endgame, would have big ramifications. I wasn't thinking of it as something that was supposed to do some serious damage to the Batfamily, but people expected death, that's really what it was. They thought Alfred would die, they thought Jason would die, they thought Batman would die, or Joker would die. That was the big one, they thought we'd finally killed Joker. But there was a lot of anger at me for not paying off that title behind the scenes. Again, on the surface things had gotten great, and there's a lot of praise for the story, luckily, but on Twitter and to me personally, there was a lot of anger about the money spent without there being a big impact from it. And that shocked me. I mean, I didn't see it coming. And I remember it really gut-punched me. And then the news came out about Zero Year, and I knew that one was going to upset people, but it did. And people were like “now he's doing the origin, fuck this guy!” And that period, those few weeks before Zero Year came out and the ending of Death of the Family had happened, and I think we had a one-shot in between, I just was like, panic attacks all the time. And it was just really rough.
And the reason I bring it up is to just say what I learned from it. And the people that really helped me through, James Tynion IV, incredibly helpful to me through that time, but also Greg. I mean, Greg would call and be like, “it's fucking great story, I love it, I'm proud to be a part of it. Wait till they see Zero Year.” He was such a great friend. Get your friends around you, don't listen to the online stuff. Whether it's legit or it's not legit, if you're in a state where you're really sensitive to that stuff, just pull away from it. Focus on your own life, your own work, get out of your own head. I was gonna get a tattoo that said, “it's just comics” at that time, just for myself, as a way of being like, it's everything to me, I love comics more than anything, and yet, it's also okay, nobody's gonna die, It's just comics. But the other thing is you have to get back up and do something that you love. You have to do something you're proud of. And Zero Year is my favorite story that we did on Batman, that and Last Knight on Earth. I mean, I love the other ones too, but those two, for me, are the ones where our Batman, our version of Batman, is so on display and the sensibilities of our run are so on display, that those things, they mean a lot to me. And to be able to get up and have Greg and everyone be like, “do the story that's bonkers. The next one is even crazier. It will push them even even further. It is pink and green and Riddler bots and superstorms and Batman wrestling a lion and purple gloves and all of it, like, just go for it.”
And that's the thing I'm trying to say, you have to get up from rejection and try harder to be who you want to be in that way. That moment was transformative for me when Zero Year came out. Not because it got good reviews. I mean, I was lucky it did. But because I loved it. I knew I had made something that I loved in spite of the fact that every time I wrote a sentence during that period, I heard a voice in my head being like, “you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck. You're really going to write that? That's awful” and so on. But I did it and that was what made me so proud. So I don't have time to talk the second thing, which is flashbacks, I'll do it next time, the nature of flashbacks and how to use them and the different purposes of them, but I'm gonna jump over and do the paid post. This one will be long, sorry Ty (best assistant), but I love you guys and thanks again!
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