Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, May 9th. Yeah, it's a huge week over here at Best Jackett. So three big housekeeping things, or three and a half, let's say. We have two huge issues out this week in print. One is Clear #3, the finale to the sci-fi noir miniseries, a creator-owned book I've been doing with Francis Manapul, dear friend and incredible creator, I hope you'll check it out. It's again, a big oversized issue. It's out from Dark Horse.
And then we have Nocterra #14 from me and Tony Daniel coming under Image. That's our creator-owned series that’s like a high-octane horrorshow in a post-apocalyptic future where a darkness has covered the earth and changes every living thing into monsters. And #14 is a huge issue for us. This arc, ‘No Breaks,’ is kind of the ultimate arc of this cycle of the book. We're going to drastically change it after this, so we really, really hope you'll check it out. This arc is going to close down the book as you know it for this iteration and then we're going to come back to it later on and be able to do some new stories within the world and even expand it once Tony gets done with a couple things he wants to do. So we're really proud of it.
Thirdly, class. We have class on Thursday night 9:30pm EST, if you are a free subscriber, you pay $7/month (or $75/year) and you can join us live. It's a discussion, we're going to be looking at published work and student work, and the topic is world building. As you're reading the materials (at the bottom of this post for paid subscribers), think about how these different writers bring in the mythology, the backstory, the ecology, all of it into the lore of their world. And we're going to look at different techniques that are effective for doing this and it's a really helpful lesson whether you're building something in a world that's genre context, like sci fi or fantasy or post apocalyptic, or if you're just doing something that's a horror book or a drama book. A lot of the time the lessons can be super helpful just for incorporating the relevant facts about the time period you're working in, even if it's the present, and contextual details about peripheral characters, all of it. So I hope you'll check it out. It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm really, really excited about both the student work and the published work. We'll be doing a tiny bit of a Star Wars theme with our published work as we were originally supposed to do this class on May the 4th, sorry.
On a personal level, I'm just coming back to life. It's so strange to not be in that writers room. I missed the people a lot. I miss the work we were doing a lot. And yet at the same time, it's like I actually have time to just work on comics and hang out with my family. And Emmett is still feeling really angry about the Yankees being in last place, we're going to try and go to the game this week. But he is excited because one of the thrift stores that Jack likes to go to to get clothes has records and he started a record collection just under a year ago, even though he has no record player. He's just one of these kids that loves ‘the best things.’ He loves to figure out what's the best, he has these rankings in his head of like, the best basketball players (that’s also why baseball appeals to him so much), the best baseball teams, the best baseball players, the best baseball year. So in music, he’s like “what's supposed to be the best albums of all time” and that stuff. And so he's been collecting them, so he's a very easy kid to shop for during his birthdays. He kind of obsessed about one thing and then he exhausts it. Luckily, he has not exhausted baseball in the last three years, but there was Pokémon and Star Wars and all kinds of stuff he's gone through. But he'll be very easy to buy a record player because he does not have one. He's been using his brothers even though he has a bigger record collection than Jack at this point.
So anyway, I saw my parents over the weekend. They came up and played ball with Emmett and took Quinn to IHOP, which he adores. Yeah, it was just really nice. And yesterday we took Quinn into the city for his third annual checkup after his big craniotomy had when he was six months and we got a clean bill of health, so he doesn't have to go back for two years. He's looking good and they all loved him and he was very funny and he’ll tell you all about it. He's very happy to tell you how he saw the doctors, the ‘dentists,’ he thinks they are. They’re “the dentists who gave him the surgery on his head.” So if you hear him, if you ever meet him, we did not actually take him to a dentist to operate on his head, but that's his theory of it. (Below you’ll find his interpretation of gargoyles)
Right now as I talk to you about this, he's playing with the wraps that I use for boxing. I've been doing boxing as an exercise, same as my buddy James Tynion IV.
And that's actually my housekeeping matter 3.5, make sure you preorder The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #1 by brother James, Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart, Aditya Bidikar, it’s going to be amazing. I've read it, it's awesome.
I've heard about this idea for so long. I know it's a passion project for James and all of them. So go get that and subscribe to The Empire of the Tiny Onion because James is the best.
I had a great talk with James a couple days ago and it's so funny to think we've been friends almost, Jesus, like between 15 to 20 years at this point, it's crazy. But we were sharing stories going back and forth, he told me some ideas he has, I told him some ideas I have for books. And when you have somebody you trust like that where you tell them an idea and say, “is this stupid, is this crazy?” And then when they say they like it, you have something special, and James has always shot me straight. And he's also somebody that I can talk to about the stresses and thrills of being on this side of your career. We're both doing it at the same time, but doing it differently. We have different priorities, although the same sensibilities, about really being dedicated to trying to make things that we love with people we want to work with. But we have different ways of going about it and different types of stories we want to tell. Sometimes we have the exact same kind of stories we want to tell. But it's fun to watch his career go so well and to sort of skyrocket in its own direction and to see him blazing such a different path than everybody else. And I can tell you again that Christopher Chaos is definitely like a big achievement. You guys should go check it out. So I can't say enough good things about that dude. He's a wonderful person, incredible writer, you need to go support him in every way possible!
But I think I brought James up because we were talking about boxing, because we're both doing it. And right now, as I say this, Quinn is playing with the boxing wraps that I use because he's turned them into snakes. He calls one Snakey, because it's so creative, and the other Jackson, so Snakey and Jackson. So he's running around right now, if you hear him in the background doing that. But it's Tuesday, so I’m going to answer to your questions. Ty, the best assistant, sent a couple over. Sorry about the sound quality—Quinn, in addition to playing with my boxing wraps, was also playing with the microphone and banged it on the ground because he was pretending it was an ice cream cone falling out of his hand, the way the ice cream cone falls out of the tourist’s hand in Lilo and Stitch and so I have to make sure it still works.
But two questions:
Jpod5090 asks, “Do you ever write scripts/stories you never plan to publish just to help develop the world and characters?”
Yeah, I do. I don't actually physically write them, but I do come up with a lot of stories that I jot down. I'll talk them through generally, like for example, for this book that I'm doing right now, it's about to start over the summer, Duck n’ Cover with Rafael Albuquerque, about these kids that hide under their desks during a nuclear exchange in the 1950s and miraculously survive. In it we came up with a whole backstory for a couple of characters that barely appear in the book and we talked about not only how they came to be who they are, but friends and characters that are important in their lives that never appear in the book.
So for example, there's a DJ named Pop Sickle, because it's the 50s and he's like a beatnik. And he's up late on the radio station and we were talking all about how he came to be who he is, and his parents, and why he rebelled, and how he became this guy that is a conspiracy theorist about aliens and Russian robots and all kinds of stuff. And it also had stuff not only about his parents, but his brother. And none of that stuff's in the book, but if we wanted to use it later on, if we continue the book, if you guys love it and you want us to do more of it, then it's all there. So yeah, I make up a lot of peripheral stories, but I don't actually write them. I don't write the stories for myself. I jot down notes and I talk them through and I have them there in my journal in case I want to use them for the future.
BenS asks, “Were there any editorial requirements (‘This character HAS to appear!’ ‘This person CAN'T be killed off!’ ‘This arc can only be 3 issues!’ etc.) that you were initially opposed to, but surprised to find actually improved the story overall in the end?”
Wow, that is a great question. I thought about this, I read it ahead of time and I was thinking about it. I feel like I could answer this a few times in a few posts, so I might return to this, like ‘editorial notes that were initially horrible and then actually wound up being really helpful.’ So one of the things I liked about DC was that generally, they would give you a malleable editorial edict that was specific to your book, not a line-wide thing, like Forever Evil or that kind of thing. If you had to do something like that then you had to do it, and I can talk about good ones and bad ones over the years. But the general rule was that if they came to you and said, “listen, we want you to do something crazy in the book like kill Joker or something at the end,” which was something that that came up a lot. And there was pressure to do that at the end of Death of the Family. And they’d say “we want him to seem dead, we want his head like, lopped off,” which is one of the ways I got an idea for Last Knight on Earth, by the way. But there was pressure to do that. And the thing I learned was, if you can go back at them and say, “Listen, I don't want to do that, but I have an idea that's better, or one you might like more that brings more heat to the character and mythology,” then they would generally let you do it.
So if I came back and I said “I don't want to kill him, but I'll do a bigger arc with him. This is part two of this story called Endgame. If you just give me some time and you still like what I'm doing, you don't fire me, and I'll bring him back and we'll do it even bigger.” Because I didn’t want my second arc of Batman to be the death of the Joker, honestly. I hadn't even written like, 15 issues at that point. It was like crazy to think that I'd be the one that killed the Joker, right? I still was proving myself then, and I didn't want to do it. And I had a second part of the story. It was comedy and tragedy, the tragedy was where Joker would die. So anyway, I came back and I said, “What if we do Endgame?” And then and then they were like, “okay.” So the general rule was, when you got a bad editorial edict, or an edict that you thought was bad, I mean, not that it was objectively bad, necessarily, you could say back, “listen, I have a better idea, or something I think is better.”
So that's what I'd say. If you really hate something, give them something better. Don't just argue why their thing isn't good. Say, “listen, I understand what you want. You want something that does XYZ. I have an idea that does XYZ+.” That's a rule that I promise as a writer that will carry you very far. It's like the judo trick that I've had to use so many times in so many different things, whether it was licensed comics, whether it's something that was in TV or film or anything. I mean, you constantly run up against that where someone's giving you notes. And for a long time, I made that mistake of just being like, “well let me explain why that won't work.” Don't do that. Explain why it won't work by giving them something that's even better and hits the priorities that they're after, but does it in your own way.
Alright, guys. Again, please, come by for the live class this Thursday. $7/month, we have a growing student body. I'm so proud of this thing. I hope you'll check it out! For the same price, you get all of our past classes archived. So for $7, you can check out 20 classes on everything from character development to introductions, everything. So we're really proud of it. Hope you'll check it out soon. And yeah, I'll see you guys on Thursday night!
S
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