Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is May 3rd, Wednesday, although you probably won't hear this till May 4th, Star Wars Day and Quinn's fourth birthday, his real birthday. We had his party last week with a lot of trampolining and bouncy housing and cupcakes and all kinds of stuff. But he was born on both Free Comic Book Day and Star Wars Day when those things overlapped and all the planets aligned, the geek worlds. And I was convinced that he would either love all things geek and be like, the king of the geek world when he grew up, or he would hate all things geek because of it and shun everything that I love. So the verdict is still out.
But it was a fun weekend. On a personal note, Jack, our 16 year old is really into thrift shopping, which is becoming very fun to do with him.
And Emmett is just moping because the Yankees are in last place. But we go out and have a catch every day and it cheers them up. Both kids are looking forward to the end of school way too much in my opinion (but I am too).
And above all, I wanted to say I'm sorry that I haven't been posting more. The last week before this WGA strike hit was really intense in this writers room for Wytches. I'm gonna start showing you some of the art that Jock did as concept art for some of it soon so you can see what we've been working on a little bit. But the work has been fantastic. I mean, I'm so proud of the show. I really think it has a chance of being something that expands the perception of adult animation a bit. I mean, it's straight up horror, but it's also really emotional and layered and the art is really different for it. So they're taking a really big swing with it, which I'm hugely grateful for, to try and do something that brings in a new audience in addition to capturing that audience that loves animation already. So that's the people that are doing Invincible, so I'm very, very excited about it.
But it's probably the first time in my career, honestly, in like, my whole 12 or 13 years doing comics, that I feel like I really miscalculated the amount of work I could handle. And really, I was mostly wrapping up comics, or sort of in the back half of comics, that I was doing for Comixology and for Image and things like that. But when I was doing the mini-room, which was the smaller writers room that I showran to get us the greenlight and purchase order for the show that got the show to be confirmed to be on television, it was less intense. It was four episodes over 14 weeks and it was slightly more casual, it was a smaller room. I didn't realize how intense this would be, in the best way. I mean, again, I'm so inspired. I miss the room deeply already, even though it's only been a couple days. But at the same time, just the amount of work was fascinating and exciting and thrilling, but a bit overwhelming as well.
With animation, you have to complete the whole season before you can send any one episode out to be animated. So you kind of create a season board first, and then boards for each episode. The season board, you use cards, essentially, so it'll have like, 10 or 15 cards per episode that are just the major beats. And then you do a further breakdown where you have every episode, which has 3 acts, six or seven cards that are in an act, every card has a timestamp of how many minutes it's supposed to take, and all that, you break it according to character and plot. But you have to have the entire thing broken down before you can actually write any one episode or really have any one episode finalized. So there's this kind of totality that has to hang in your head. You have to see the entire design, which is a different format entirely from comics. I mean, I always have a pretty thorough outline when I start a series. I know what the arc is and I know the ending and I know the major beats, but I allow myself some room to play and to respond to the art. So having to have everything scripted and really down in a meticulous way before it goes out, it's just a new experience for me.
So basically, my day was get up, work on comics in the morning, and then go into the room around 9am PST/noon EST, but first usually meet with my co-showrunner Marion an 40-60 minutes before the room, talk about the day, what we want to do, what we want to accomplish, then be in the room till 3:00pm their time, 6:00pm my time. So about six hours with an hour off for lunch. And during that lunch break I go get the kids from school and bring him back. And then once they were asleep, I try and work on comics again. And so the last month has just been way, way harder than I thought. But now that the strike happened, and again, it's an awful thing, I was not rooting for it to happen, but I do almost feel like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when his parents kiss at the Under the Sea ball and all of a sudden he like, is whole again and can play the guitar. I sort of feel like that a little bit where it's wow, I have a moment to breathe and already, just in the past couple days, I caught up and moved through a bunch of comic work that I'm just excited to get back to also.
So I'll sort of be all caught up and ready to go back in the room really soon, but I didn't realize how much I was burning it at both ends until I had a day off and I was like, “oh my God, I’m just beat.” So all solidarity with everybody in the WGA. I'd picket it if I lived anywhere near New York City, but I'm in full support of everything they're asking for it. We can post more about it. Ty can post a link to some of the things that are pretty egregiously wrong with the system as it stands right now.
Big week at DC, go check out Shazam! and Batman #900 and Peacemaker Tries Hard! and go support that stuff, because DC is really killing it right now.
As for Quinny, he is sort of obsessed with Batman and tells Batman stories every night. His nightlight is a Batsignal. I did not do any of this. I swear he just likes Batman, which is both haunting and exciting to me. But he tells his own Batman stories, which are probably better than mine.
But Two Question Tuesday (even though it's Wednesday), the first one is:
Ken Janssens asks, “Do you approach plotting a four-issue miniseries differently than plotting an 80-page graphic novel?”
He's basically asking, do you work differently if it's one long story? And the truth is, some people really do. For me, I don't. I have this strange built-in muscle memory and also just taste for serialized fiction. My favorite novels have that kind of cliff-hanging sensibility chapter to chapter, even when they're dramas, even when it's something not as propulsive, not as genre-based. But I love that feeling of getting to the end of a chapter and being like, “Ooh, I'm really surprised.” And they don't have to be incredibly bombastic. But so a story like Book of Evil is written almost as one piece. I'm writing it as though it's singular, even though it's coming out sequentially on digitally platforms, I conceived of it as one singular thing. And similar with By a Thread, honestly. By a Thread almost works like a wire a graphic novel, but they're both going to be released in single issues. But I think of them the same way, I would think of something that I knew was designed to be single issues. I just enjoy that format. So for me, it isn't really that different. I don't know why, I just I love things that have that kind of peak and valley and sort of chapter break mentality. I wrote Last Knight on Earth like that, actually. It's kind of one long thing, but still broken into those parts.
Second question:
jsquillen asks, “what's a good rule of thumb for recapping the previous part of a story that is being continued?”
For me, honestly, I was taught at DC that you can't recap. It was one of our rules I never agreed with it early on. But the thing I really benefited from it was to learn that you have to be able to communicate information about what the series is about and think of it as a first issue for someone and execute that sensibility, even when you can't have a recap page. So it made me really think about how do I bring somebody in if I can't just do an exposition dump, I can't just do that Star Wars crawl. So what I'd say is try that, because nobody wants to open a comic and read a recap. Honestly, it makes them feel you have a knee jerk reaction automatically to feel like you missed out on things. Yes, it holds your hand and it can be comforting, but it also can be repelling. So if you have a way of conveying through dialogue without it being too heavy or too dense or if you have a way through communicating through action or any of what happens before, only if it's necessary information. I'd say try that. So there is no rule of thumb but I'd say use as a compass—the less the better, the more you can communicate in story, the better.
A little bit of housekeeping, a book I'm really really proud of, Dark Spaces: Wildfire, co-created by the great Hayden Sherman and with Ronda Pattison on colors:
Ronda actually colored my very first comic ever, I realized when I was looking back, Human Torch Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 over at Marvel, which I still get like a penny royalty for now and then, but I love this book. It's about female inmates in California's penal system who are part of a firefighter program and are out fighting wildfires and decide to pull off a heist. And it's part of a line I'm doing over at IDW with the great Mark Doyle, who was just promoted to publisher over there, and he encouraged me to do it. And it's just it's a line of books that’s really based on human interaction and pressure cooker scenarios. So there's nothing supernatural, no monsters, no superheroes. It's really almost like plays. They're not locked in a box, you move around, there's big set pieces, but it's all about sort of human drama. We already have the next one planned and I'm excited to announce it soon. And the line also supports new writers, new artists. We're doing a book called Good Deeds with my friend and incredible talent, Che Grayson, and we have more to announce soon. So I hope you'll check it out.
Also next week, Clear #3 (of 3) from me and Francis Manapul comes out. We're about to have some very exciting news on the TV/film front with that one.
And also Nocterra #14, which I really love, is out next week and that's also set up over at Netflix. So excited about that too. But this arc is something I'm really proud of and I love what Tony's doing on the pages. So I hope you'll check it out!
Now I'm going to move over and do the paid post, and what I want to talk about a little bit is scope. I'm going to talk about it over the course of a few weeks. We're going to do a class next week, I didn't anticipate a couple of things this week. My wife actually, crazy enough, somebody passed out with the wheel down the street behind her at a light and smashed into the car in front of her, barely missing her and Emmett, and it really rattled all of us. And just full disclosure, I just don't feel up to teaching this week because of all that. So I apologize. But next week, I'm really thrilled to be back at it. I'll post the materials with Tyler on Friday for it, and I'm gonna be thinking about scope. So I'm gonna move over talk a little bit in the paid post about thinking about scope and your story, how to expand and contract, and one technique that we'll take a look at, cold opens. Okay, thanks!
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