Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Wednesday, June 7th, and as I make this recording I am driving to Emmett's very first baseball game. He made the team! We’re really excited, he's excited and nervous, as am I, of course. He's listening to his headphones in the back. But I think he's going to do great, wish us luck, it’s that parent’s butterflies in your stomach, total anxiety but also real pride and excitement. This is something that he learned to do well over the last three years when he didn't know how to do it at all at the beginning, like we didn't know anything about baseball, how to play, anything about professional baseball at all, either. And then he just wanted to learn about it and he just did. And he knows everything about everything now, and he's really good. So he wanted to try out, he made it, and now we have our first game. So we'll see how it goes!
But a quick bit of housekeeping. Today, Nocterra #15 comes out.
I’m really happy with this one. We have issue #15, we have the Nocterra: Nemesis Special drawn by the amazing Liam Sharp (FOC for which is this Sunday), and then we have Nocterra #16, and that's really it.
We're going to put the series on hiatus after we finish this cycle. It gives a really big, over the top, bombastic finale to this arc and to this cycle of the series. And we always planned on doing about three arcs and then seeing where we were. And it's doing better than we had hoped. But overall, we can't thank you guys enough. Like, we're really shocked we're still selling what we are at issue #15, #16, and so on. But Tony’s really wanted to do his own series for a while and at least to give it a shot, and see how it goes for an arc. And I'm sure it's going to be a big hit, I think it's going to be fantastic. It's called Edenwood and it's about witches vs. vampires in the Midwest, demon hunting, and all kinds of cool stuff.
But like American Vampire, that's what we did. We finished a cycle, we finished the first big half of it and then we left door opens come back to it, and then we did and told the second half that we’d always planned. With this, we have plans to return and do something really big and dark and we have another version of it that's a little bit lighter. But it really just depends on how things go with you guys and how much you want us to come back to it, how much the other series that we're working on perform and that stuff too and all of it. I mean, I'd love to just keep writing it, and I know Tony loves the series too. But I also think that it's harder for an artist because you can only work on one thing, and he's been working on it for 3+ years, so I totally understand. I have the ability to do all these different projects in addition to Nocterra—Barnstormers, Clear, Night of the Ghoul, Wildfire, We Have Demons, and Canary and just up and down. But he can't do that, so I'm really excited for him to get him in it to be able to do something his own altogether. So I hope you'll support that, get out there and preorder it and all that stuff too. But also, last few days to vote for Barnstormers for the Eisners if you get a chance. It would mean a lot to me and Tula, we're really excited about it. It's nominated for Best Digital Comic.
And because it's Tuesday, I thought I'd answer a couple of your questions. For paid subscribers, we're going to post that long two hour chat I did with Sean Murphy the other night. So you guys, if you missed it live, you'll get to watch it. So that's going to be the paid part of this week's post:
BAT CHAT w/ Sean Gordon Murphy
The question I got was about the road to Superman: Unchained and how I got to do that book with Jim Lee, because we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary, God that’s insane. But it was crazy what the impetus was story was, and it was crazy how I got to work with Jim. The feel was that Batman would be big and bombastic and the Superman one would be a slightly more indie feel. There were a couple artists I was talking to or talking about, from styles like Chris Samnee and more muted styles for it.
And the idea with it, what I really wanted to do is I was fascinated by the old 40s Superman strips where he was pretty political. I mean, he was a folk hero first, as Grant showed in Action Comics. But he also like, fought for the military during the war, and he believed in truth, justice and the American way, the American way being the emphasis on that during the war. I wanted to write a story about how Superman as he stands, as this idealistic thing, is so doomed. Every choice he makes means that Superman can't last very long. For example, he chooses to be Clark Kent, so with Clark Kent, people will figure out, as Clark Kent does not age, that he's not human at a certain point.
Similarly, Superman doesn't affiliate himself with any country officially, so Clark doesn't fight for America, he doesn't work with the UN or any of that stuff, he really does what he thinks is right and acts idealistically, which means that governments would be building stockpiles of weapons and kryptonite and such that would bring him down. And ultimately, working on on personal ideal entirely, similarly, it means that he's going to be threatening to someone. And at the end of the day, people are going to be angry that he's not working for their country or they're going to see him as biased and so on. What I'm saying is in the real world, or even if you just think about it logically, the choices that Clark makes (I always call them Clark rather than Kal because the version I worked on thinks of themselves as Clark) sort of doom him to only have a span as Superman of a few years before something bad's gonna happen, whether people realize he's Clark Kent because Clark Kent isn’t aging, whether people band against him, countries, individuals, and so on.
And so the story was about a Superman who makes different choices, and Wraith, who's kind of an extension of that Superman in the 40s, who was more aligned with the American government, and what would happen if they sort of faced off in this epic battle.
And the way I got Jim Lee involved was that, again, I was originally talking about working with some smaller artists. And we were at San Diego and Jim really liked Batman, he took me out to breakfast, and I remember he ate cereal, he ate Froot Loops (I thought that was so cool). We were in the Hard Rock restaurant and he told me he really wanted to do something that was big, like Hush big in terms of size and that. I pitched him when I was thinking for Superman and he really liked it. And I remember he said, “maybe I'll give it a try if you can give me a few months.” And I was like, “of course!” And the idea of working with Jim Lee, I mean, I remember leaving that and almost fainting, like leaving that breakfast and literally almost fainting and just calling James Tynion and being like, “you're never gonna believe what just happened.” And Jim was an amazing partner. One of the funniest things is he kept giving us pages, so I have some amazing pages from Superman: Unchained that I’ll have Tyler post:
And the best part was he actually drew Jeanie in. At one part, Lois is talking to a doctor about somebody who was injured because of the Sunstone material that was found and discovered, and the doctor’s my wife Jeanie:
Part of the idea that was showing not a corrective, but an alternative that was slightly more classic to some of the stuff they were doing with the New 52 at that time, or at least leaning in that direction. But once it was in continuity, it became slightly harder, but we were still able to do it, moving him back into a relationship, even if not romantic then friendship-wise Lois rather than Wonder Woman at that time just to reestablish how inspiring Lois is to him in a lot of ways. Also bringing Jimmy in, bringing the Daily Planet in even though at the time Clark was working across doing a blog, I think it was, with Cat Grant. So it was trying to give it a feel at least that there were still elements of classic Superman even in the new landscape of the New 52, and I think Jim responded to that too. And it was kind of both, like Batman was for us. It was New 52 but it had this costume, it had this flavor, but at the same time it it leaned into continuity existing in some ways, or nodding to it. So it was a lot of fun. I'm really proud of that book. Alright guys, I'm gonna end it there because we're about to start this game. Wish us luck. Talk to you soon!
S
Newsletter #142: Unchained Melody