Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Sunday, July 9th, although you'll hear this probably on Monday, because I wouldn't make Ty, great assistant, transcribe something on the weekend. But I'm sitting in my car, you can probably hear the rain. I just finished this podcast from the Wall Street Journal. The Journal is also their podcast, but they have a four-part series called With Great Power. And it's kind of a history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it's got interviews with a lot of key people at Marvel and DC—Brian Bendis and people at the studios and it's really fascinating. And it's the second or third thing that I've read or listened to in the last couple of months, there was a big article in The New Yorker that Ty can put the links to both these things here, about the impact culturally and the achievement and challenge that the Marvel Cinematic Universe poses. And it's fascinating because between that and a lot of the conversations I've been having with friends at DC and Marvel but also in my thinking about superheroes, I'm always thinking about superheroes too, I feel like I'll never grow out of it. And I'm always in conversation with DC about doing stuff that sometime and I have thoughts about Marvel as well. But it's such an interesting thing, because I wanted to get your opinion on this.
And as this first aside, before I dive into it, I wanted to do a quick couple quick housekeeping things. One is, it feels like social media is just dying, man. And like Twitter was fun back in the day, not even a couple years ago, but like six or seven years ago, when it was just us talking to each other and fucking around on there and posting things about books you're excited about—your own, other people's, whatever. And now it's just like, this loud, noisy, toxic place full of corporate interests yelling at you and then people that have paid to be able to yell at you. And then Bluesky seems nice and there's Threads all of a sudden now too, but that’s Zuckerberg, and it just feels like social media existed a while ago to be social. My kids don't use it for social aspects at all. Like, my 16 year-old uses TikTok and all of that stuff just to send shit to his friends. They use Snapchat, which appears and disappears, to talk to each other. They don't have IG really. They just don't care about using social media for social media. And they're not wowed by influencers and that stuff. That’s just not where they get their shit. So it's kind of fascinating to me, but I'm going to be making a bigger effort, I will do a Threads account, I will do a Bluesky account, because I want people to see the things that I'm excited about when it comes to work (like Duck and Cover #1, which comes out TOMORROW)
But I'm going to spend more time over here. I feel like it's everyone looking for the right afterparty and it's just such a weird feeling. So you'll see those accounts. I'm going to do more here.
And I'm really excited we're going to do we're doing our very first Book Club for paid subscribers, we're going to be looking at a short piece of fiction. It's going to be this Wednesday night at 9:30pm EST on the paid Discord server. It's Stephen King's “The Boogeyman,” one of my absolute favorite short stories of all time, we’ll often look at comics but we're going to start off with a short story this time. But we're gonna do it twice a month and do the class and I'm also going to add a Masterclass, which I might do one month instead of looking at student work. I'll do a masterclass on how to write a superhero comic and I'll do one on how to generate a pitch for creator-owned, all that kind of stuff. I feel like I love the interaction and reading student work, but I could add another component that’s me sort of giving you the best advice I can on a certain topic because people have been asking. So we're gonna add a lot of that stuff.
And then we have San Diego in less than two weeks, which is insane. If you're a paid subscriber, you're basically gonna get a backstage pass to the Eisners and to all the other things that we're going to be doing there. I'll post about hanging out with the friends that I'm meeting there, and business associates, and all kinds of stuff. So I think you'll be really happy. So if you're not a paid subscriber, I don't mean to show but I honestly believe it's a great time to sign up. We're going to have more stuff in terms of the classes, more stuff in terms of teaching opportunities for you.
We have merch coming next week, we have a new site where you can order things more easily that’s powered by the amazing Third Eye Comics down in Baltimore. And if you're going to San Diego, it's definitely worth it for you because you can skip any line that I have for signing. And if you're a Black Jackett subscriber, that isn't open yet, but we'll probably open it for a short window after San Diego, we have our big dinner. I think it’s like, 30 people or so coming. I'll have a surprise guest, It's gonna be fun. We treat you and it'll be great. So I'm really looking forward to it Thursday night. So that little bit of housekeeping.
Also, Night of the Ghoul is out in trade:
Barnstormers #1 came out this week from Dark Horse in single issue form and I can't thank you enough for the kind words on both those books, I genuinely would put them up there with anything I've done in my career as what I think is my best work and I owe all that to the collaborators, the amazing artists and co-creators on those books. So I hope you'll check them out.
But yeah, so I wanted to get your State of the Union on this, because it's a big topic and I'm really fascinated by it. But it feels like there are all of these kinds of autopsies right now in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and not because it's dead, but just because it's in a bit of a lull before they start doing big films like Fantastic Four and X-Men and sort of open up some of the franchises they've got afterwards. And a lot of the biggest stories with these characters that they developed over 10 years have kind of come to a close—Iron Man, Captain America, the Spider-Man trilogy seems to have possibly put a button on Tom Holland. But you can bring everybody back through Secret Wars, so who knows? I'm just saying that it feels like a moment when people are reassessing. There have been some things that haven't done done as well. Similarly, there have been some critical rejections of things at DC, The Flash underperformed, so there's a lot of investigating and thinking about superheroes and are we tired of them.
And it's fascinating, because for me, these are the moments where we've done big things in comics, the times that I got excited about things like Marvel Knights, for example, I mean, Quesada and Palmiotti.
And there was Heroes Reborn or the Ultimate Universe, I mean, what Brian was able to do, and then what Mark Millar did with it, and everybody, I mean, it was just unbelievable.
But it's those moments, when it feels like things are exhausted, that it's time, in my opinion, to bend things, to create new things, for these characters to take a swing to take a risk. And that can mean a lot of different things, it can mean letting them grow a little bit, letting them mature a bit. It can mean breaking some of the rules around a character, it can mean trying new versions of the character, all kinds of stuff in different mediums. But in comics, we have all this flexibility because they have these long-standing majestically successful ecosystems of heroes over at Marvel that are theme park rides, and they have so much invested and you can't pivot easily. And say we're doing a new Captain America, comics can. And again, just you know, I will always be in awe, I've been saying it for years, that I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the great triumphs in pop culture of the last century. I mean, I think we'll be looking back on it more than Star Wars as something that was this achievement that is really Herculean, to create an interconnected universe with so many great stories and so many hits and to just to try that model and have it work is just fascinating to me, and all the hurdles that could have stopped it and how they were overcome.
So what I'm getting at is that I find this moment hugely exciting, because I think it's one of those opportunities to take superheroes and bend the rules. And I think the message of Spider-Verse, I won't ruin it for you, but one of the messages of Across the Spider-Verse, which is fascinating to me, is the same thing that I think a lot of us are thinking. It's been something that's been a real north star for me in terms of me wanting to go back to superheroes at any point. If I do, I want to do something that has that message, and it was so strange sitting in that theater and seeing it, where they said that Miles essentially believes that maybe there canon events in characters’ histories, maybe they’re alternate versions of Spider-Man, but still, that are okay to change. You can change what you expect about a character as long as they're true to core, as long as they're still about the things that that character has always been about. I'm not saying you take them and you break them into something crazy, like Batman suddenly becomes a serial killer. What I'm saying is, I do think that when things feel exhausted, or they feel safe, or they feel familiar, it's time to try things that take some risks.
And I made my career on doing smaller, mitigated versions of that at first. I pushed as hard as I could to do things that DC that there was a lot of pushback on. James Gordon Jr., there was a lot of pushback. It got canceled early on, without getting too into it, a couple of people there didn't want it to happen, canceled it, and then Dan DiDio revitalized it and said “no, you can do it.” Court of Owls, that was canceled and I had to come in and argue with them, as I've told that story. But they came around and said “yeah, do it,” but because they didn't think Bruce could have a brother, they didn't think a new villain like that could work, etc. But again, it's not about “well, I have tried this thing to this huge extent before,” but I mean, it's built into the DNA of why I love superhero stories. And I was having a really interesting conversation with James Tynion IV and he was pointing out the different ways in which people come at superheroes. Some people come at it because they grew up with certain things that they want to come back into superheroes. They want the things they grew up with to be a part of superhero culture in comics. And so they get into it to be able to tell stories that kind of echo the stories that they loved. Sometimes it's to bring back characters they loved, sometimes it's to kind of lean back into a kind of tenor even if it's updated and changed. Geoff Johns is very much like this, right? Geoff is great about the updated Silver Age stuff.
And then there are other people, sometimes, that come at it from different angles. And again, that's a great angle to come at it from, so there's no shade at that at all. I'm just saying a different angle, or the one that I've always come at it with is that I want these characters to mean something to me in this particular moment, and especially for my kids, where they're showing them how to be brave in the face of all of their fears. And some characters are more appropriate for certain things than others. So Batman has always been my favorite because he always made me feel brave in the face of the fears that I had as a kid, because they were represented so powerfully and resoundingly in his mythology, in Dark Knight Returns and in Batman: Year One and Arkham Asylum. All these things that made me scared about the world at that point, or I was scared about, Batman faced, Batman worked in that way. And I think the way Miles is working for my kids, and the things that he is up against, sort of the systems in place and expectations about everything, about the comic universe, but about his actual real world in that story that he wants to break, and say, “listen, these things need to change in different ways because they can and they should.” It's such a moving philosophy and it's a way that I love coming up comics. The big rule, and I was talking to Donny Cates about this a while ago, and he was saying the same thing, but the biggest sin is to be boring and play it safe with these heroes. The best stories are the ones that take them and pit them against things on an epic scale that means something at this particular moment, and if that means taking some risks, you should take risks with them.
And so I feel like it's this very fertile moment, honestly, for a kind of revitalization. Not that it's dead or something like that, but I think that there’s a kind of lull in some ways in movies and TV right now. And I think sometimes that can extend to comics, or the comics can have a period where people are happy and were playing it well and things are going alright. But then every once awhile, you feel it and you say “you know what, it's time to try something that's going to remind people why comics is the greatest storytelling medium ever, and this is where these heroes were born.” And I feel that right now, I'm excited to see creators do that. I'm excited to think about that, and see if there's a place to do something like that.
So again, I feel that it's so interesting to me. All I'm saying is that there's so many things right now that are pointing to this lull and saying that maybe it's over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in different ways. And I don't think that at all, I think they're going to come roaring back and do things we don't expect. I have full faith in James Gunn and I think DC is going to build something that's going to be incredible, too. But it's that period, it’s the lull before this ascent again. And that moment is a time to rethink. It's a moment where you can think “what swing do I want to take?” What thing would make this character really, really powerful to me and my kids, or kids in general if you don't have them or whatever, at this moment in time? What do they speak to? What are they about? What is Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman about? What are they at their core and how do you keep that and, at the same time, have the hero be relevant for the moment? What things do you change in some ways? And I love those conversations, and I love coming at it that way.
Every story arc I did, I promise, was always from that compass. It was “what am I afraid of right now and how do I tell a story where Batman is brave in the face of that thing?” And sometimes that meant, like I said, bending the rules a little bit or trying new things, being additive, giving Jim Gordon a psychotic son and having all the anger that I was showing people maybe he was a bad father in some way, which was the accusation, or creating a (possible) brother for Batman. And again, people said I was bending too much in that way, or the Joker being a horror character and I'm just going slaughterfest. And if you believe in what you're doing because you're trying to make the characters relevant and resonant to you and the people you care about, I'm telling you that criticism always falls away. It can still hurt, it can still make you depressed in some ways and it's hit me at different times. But at the end of the day, you'll always be able to withstand it because if you believe in what you're doing, if you believe in it and you're not trying to make them happy, the fans, you're a fan. And if you are making it and you love it and it's something you would put on your shelf, even if it's like Last Knight on Earth, where it's like, Batman is a young clone of Batman and the old Batman, you don't know what happened to him. That’s crazy, crazy stuff that if you told me that when I was a kid, I'd be like, “I don't know.” But that story to me, my favorites that I did, even though I know people point to Court of Owls, and I love Court of Owls. I love it dearly, even though it was a stressful time. But the ones that I'm proud of stuff, honestly, are Zero Year and Last Knight on Earth for the Batman run.
And they might not be perfect. But it was where we were taking our biggest swings and saying “this is about something right now that I want to speak about in this way that my kids are afraid of, that I'm afraid of, all that.” So I just think it's that moment. It's about how heroes have meant so much over the last 15 years to people on the big screen, and I think we're sometimes daunted in comics by the success of an interconnected universe. And I think it's a great moment to be thinking about and talking about, as fans, as creators, as retailers, what is it that comics can do to prove again that we're the most epic canvas for these stories, and to show why these heroes will always be relevant in that regard.
So I'm really interested to hear what you think about it and see if you feel like “no, it's more of a time where I think superheroes should stay in the lane for a while and be licensed out and instead we should focus on creator-owned.” Do you feel like, “no, it's really a time to do those things and take some risks and build something cool,” or “no, everything's fine.” Just respond in the comments. I'm gonna be spending more time here and I want to see it. So talk to me, let me know what you think. I'm of the mindset that it's like, these are the moments when you plant seeds and you're like, “something really cool can happen.” So I'm excited, and I'm excited to see what people believe and to be a part of that conversation in some way as well. But again, just a week and a half away, San Diego, sign up for a paid subscription. Come with us there, Ty gonna be posting tons of stuff that is exclusive for paid people. Like, I'm going to try and do an interview, but you'll get photos and posts and everything that we're doing there behind the scenes, so it'll be a lot a lot of fun. So it's a good time to sign up for the paid Our Best Jackett. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it, and I'll talk to you soon!
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Newsletter #148: The Current State of Superhero Comics