Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, June 20th. I hope you had a great Father's Day, got to celebrate Juneteenth, all that. Over here it was really fun, actually. I took Emmett to his last baseball game of the intramural team, we're going to try out for a travel team soon. He did great, his batting average is 1000. He walked half the times he was up at bat and then hit the other half, so I was very proud of Em and he's super into it.
Then the kids took me out to lunch at a restaurant right by here where we live, right on the water, so I can look out and see the ocean and relax.
And then they wanted to go for a drive. I have an old ‘68 Camaro:
I did a thing for paid subscribers with Sean Murphy a few weeks ago and I tell the whole story of how I got this car, but I love it.
I've had it a few years and the boys don't always want to go out in it. I think they went through periods where sometimes they were embarrassed by it and sometimes they thought it was amazing. My 16 year-old has finally come around and thinks it's amazing and wants to drive it which obviously I'm never going to let happen. But we went for the long drive in the car and brought a speaker and listened to their music, which was a lot of fun. And then I took Quinn on a run. We went for a ‘lollipop run’ as he calls it because he gets to eat a lollipop on the way. And it was great. It was just a really nice day with the kids. And the night before I went out to dinner with Jeanie, the two of us, and it was wonderful.
It really was just one of those things where I don't know, being a dad, I always was terrified of it. You can read it in so much of my work from 2009 to 2013—Death of the Family is all about the fears to being a father, Wytches is obviously all about the fears of being a father. So much of my stuff is about the fear of screwing up as a dad, the fear of worrying that you're not good enough to be a dad, the fear of your career faltering is being a dad, the fear that you don't want to be a dad, all of it. Like, all the thoughts you're not supposed to have, everything. But the truth is, as corny as it sounds, it's my favorite thing in the world. I love being a dad to these three kids. I’m very grateful to all three of you for having me as your father.
But couple quick housekeeping things before we go any further. First, if you are a member of the Black Jacket Club, and again, we can't open it right away or anytime very soon, just because it's full. But after San Diego, we're going to open it for a week or so to gauge how many more people want to join quickly. We have a dinner coming up for it at SDCC (emails have been sent out to all Founder’s Tier members, so please fill out the form even if you know you can’t make it!) so if you join, you will get that. But also we're going to be revamping our website, it's gonna go up real soon. It's powered by Third Eye Comics in Maryland, one of my favorite stores in the world. And everything you order will be through them essentially. So it's supports a local shop and it's great, we're going to put up merch, we're going to put up stuff from Best Jacket, shirts, that kind of thing. We're going to eventually do merch from the books. But also you can order the books, you're going to be able to order signed books and exclusives and all that stuff. But Black Jackett members, if you do sign up for it and you want to be a part of the whole highest tier, then you'll get an early crack at a lot of the stuff we put up there before everybody else. Also, Black Jackett members get to meet with me. I do office hours and you can meet once a month, sometimes more if you're working on stuff you want to show it to me. I try not to broadcast it too wide because it takes up a lot of time, but I love doing it. So yeah, there's always an opportunity for that too.
Anyway, other things—Nocterra: Nemesis Special, Final Order Cut-Off is Monday, 6/26. I'm really excited.
It’s our penultimate issue before we take a hiatus, before the series kind of ends. I mean, we want to come back to it and obviously if it does get made into a TV show at Netflix, we'll pick it up again. But Tony is going to do his own book for a while, Edenwood, it’s going to be amazing. And while we definitely want to come back the way I did with American Vampire after a while, it will be a pretty long break. So I hope you'll read it, it ends the series in a way that allows us to pick it up and go darker, brighter, all of it, but gives definitely a kind of closure to all the stuff that we've set up so far. But this is the second to last. It's a special issue by the amazing Liam Sharp, I think one of the most dazzling issues that we've done artistically. It just looks beautiful. I'm really, really proud of it and Tony is too and I hope you'll check it out.
Alright, so Two Question Tuesday. And then what I'm going to do for paid subscribers is I'm going to do something on Thursday, I was thinking about doing a talk with a friend because that seemed to go over really well. But either way, I'm going to make a special post just for paid subscribers on Thursday. Again, you can always sign up $7 A month you get all of our class you get all kinds of stuff, I won't go into it here.
But anyway, two questions:
Tony Adams asks, “This may be a very dumb question but I hear a lot of professional comic writers talk about doing a lettering pass and I’m not sure exactly what it is. So what’s a lettering pass?”
No way, Tony, that’s not dumb. Well a lettering pass is after you write your script and send it to the artist, the artist comes back with drawn pages and at that stage, you do another pass that's just lettering. So you might have already written all the dialogue and then you can I just say, “hey, can you make the lettering pass the script I already wrote?” But my favorite stage, honestly, is that stage where the art comes back and you adjust what you wrote in the initial script, in your lettering script, to better reflect what was told in the art. For me, it's the key to the collaborative process. You get back art, a lot of the time it does a lot of the storytelling that you thought you would need to explain a narration or a dialogue and that frees you up to say different things, to have characters go deeper in different ways, maybe to say nothing and just let things breathe. So the lettering pass is that stage before it goes to print, after you've done your script. The artist has drawn pages and they've come back to you and now you're adjusting, for the final time, the dialogue and narration between the characters where you cut out all the description. You just do a script, it's just letters essentially, just dialogue and narration. Below is an example from the first Nocterra issue back in late 2020 to early 2021:
TJ Wilson asks, “How do you do turn down someone coming to you with a project in a graceful way if you aren't interested in something in the future? How do you tell your editor etc. you are going to miss a deadline without getting fired?”
Honestly, I just think it's a tiny industry and it's just something to remember. We all circle each other a lot. So even if they might be asking you to do a job that you really don't want right now or if they work at a place you don't like, not that you don't like it, or if you obviously if you find it offensive, that's a whole other thing, but it's the place you wouldn't want to work or write for, that doesn't mean that they're not going to be at a place you do in a year or two. And so the key for me is to just always try and keep good relationships. Obviously, if someone's a bad player, you should be upfront and you can say like, “I don't ever want to work with you,” you can be that way if you want. I try and be transparent and honest. But for the most part, the people working in comics are really good people and even if they're at a place that doesn't interest you, they very well might wind up at a place that you really want to work in a couple of years. So my suggestion would be to just say something like, “thanks so much for your interest. I really appreciate you asking me. My schedule is just packed for right now, but maybe sometime in the future.” Or if what you really want is to make a statement about the place they work at, if you don't want to work there for particular reasons, you can say, “look, I really want to work with you but I have a problem with this place because of the way they do their rates/the way you work with ancillary (film and TV) rights” or something that so hopefully when you're at a different place down the line it’s, “I'd love to work with you, I like the books you've done, but right for right now I don't think we're a good fit.” Just something like that.
Okay, so for Thursday, special posts for paid subscribers. Again, feel free to jump over and subscribe (just $75 for a whole year or $7 monthly). And yeah, guys, I'm just excited that you still love doing this as much as I do. Thanks!
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Newsletter #144: Father and Son