Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Wednesday, July 12th, and San Diego is upon us, I can't believe it. So some housekeeping things quickly. We have our first Book Club tonight, it's going to be just a sort of test run, I'm really excited about it. It's on the Discord server for paid subscribers, and we're going to be looking at “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King, one of my absolute favorite short stories. We're going to do this once a month and the class once a month, so we're going to have something every two weeks. We'll usually look at comics and I'll go over with you guys what I think works, what I think isn't working, I'm up for suggestions. I feel like if you guys pick stuff that we're going to read, that would be great. So we'll have a lot of fun over there.
I want to do something based on the excitement around that last post I did. I was so moved, honestly, to see so many people reach out to me privately, but also respond to the comments and all that stuff about this notion that you agree in some capacity, or there's a feeling that maybe I'm wrong about exactly what to do. But there's a desire, at least, for superheroes to mean something now and to be revitalized in some way, or just to sort of be energized in a way that reminds people out there that have become so familiar with them and accustomed to them that this space, comics, is the generator. It's the big engine for all of that stuff that you see on the screen. And you can name the comics, right? Obviously, some of them are just named after them, like Civil War. But a lot of the time you'll see that the stuff came from moments of great invention, moments of crisis in comics when companies try things they hadn't before, or moments of daring, even if there weren't things going wrong. But it came from the risk-taking. It came from the desire to make bigger things to add and to break things.
I mean, I took a lot of heat, when we did Metal, about breaking the Source Wall. But my genuine belief was that we were honoring Kirby on his 100th birthday by saying the source will exist to be broken, it's not a boundary. At that time it was created, it was essentially something so far beyond the parameters of what existed in the DCU, it was saying “we need to go further.” To me, it wasn't something that bounded it but was itself a sort of affirmation of the need to be imaginative and push into new realms that you hadn't seen before. So again, I love that approach. I love the idea, and your guy's enthusiasm for the idea, that these characters have existed this long because usually with the biggest ones, and sometimes with smaller ones as well, there is a way to find your own passion through them. And sometimes that means breaking things with them. It doesn't mean changing who they are at their core and bending them to something that doesn't make any sense, turning Superman into a murderer or whatever. It's not always those kinds of things.
But Superman's core values, somebody who comes here and is inspired by the capacity for human kindness, inspired by compassion, inspired by determination for truth between his parents, between Lois, that idea of saying, “I see the best in you, and I am aspiring to be that,” that never is going to be old. It's a tale about somebody who comes to this place from somewhere far away and sees the best of us and reminds us to train be that all the time. Batman—Batman isn't about wealth, he's not “my superpowers is being rich,” I don't agree with that, to be frank. I really believe Batman could grow up in any economic situation. That's my personal belief. But at his core, what he's about, what excites people about him, isn't the gadgets and the money and those things. What excites people about him is that he's somebody who takes a personal tragedy, an incident that shows him how chaotic and unjust the world can be, and turns that into fuel to make sure that that kind of thing won't happen to somebody else. And sometimes he's wrong and he might go about it in a way you disagree with, but that idea of wanting to go out there and protect people from the terrible thing that happened to you and turning your wound, your scar, your fear into power, that's what resonates about Batman to me.
Not to go through every superhero, but with Spider-Man you clearly see it in all over the place right now how resilient that mythology is, because Spider-Man is about anyone can be a superhero. Yes, he gets bitten by a spider, but he's an everyman. That's the whole idea, that Spider-Man is somebody that says we're all heroes in our own way. He's one of us. And by being clumsy and flawed and disorganized and a nerd and all of those things, he's saying “we all have a superhero inside of us.” It's about with great power comes great responsibility, but it's also about how everybody has great power. You have power just by virtue of being you by being alive. Be responsible, be a hero.
So anyway, the point is, outside of those things, I feel like everything can be moved around. Everything can be revitalized. Again, I keep this thing on my desktop. I’d have to dig through a million posts, a million screenshots of my kids or whatever to find it, but it's a letter to the editor that came out when Year One was published about somebody saying how the character was broken, they were never going to read DC Comics again, because Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli had turned Jim Gordon into a womanizing drunk and destroyed the character and everything was grim and there's nothing super heroic. And that to me, that moment of fan yelling about that, is wonderful. Not because fans are wrong, not because you have to always defy them, but because in a moment when something has become so canonized like that, you forget that it was dangerous and it was risky and all of that. That's the stuff that I love.
And half the time, your favorite stories are the things you go back to and say, “oh, that classic probably did something that wasn't in the mold and probably did something that wasn't safe at all when it came out. It's just we don't remember anymore.” There's this nostalgia that I think is so dangerous all the time about how “it used to be better.” It didn't used to be better at all. And anyway I’m obviously not even talking about social stuff which, of course, wasn't better. But I just mean in terms of cultural production, there’s times where you're like, “oh, there was so many great movies back then.” No, there weren't. They're fucking horrible movies half the time. But there were some great ones, and that's awesome.
But it's that idea of trying to recontextualize the things and say, “these are powerful to me for core reasons that don't necessarily have to do with keeping some things the same that I think are the same. It's okay to try and make them mean something to me at this moment when I do a new arc (I'm gonna do a class about this, about writing for superheroes), but also for your kids if you're a parent. I want Batman to mean something to my kid, and that means listening to the things that he's afraid of, my 16 year-old. That's why we did Zero Year. It was trying to show in the origin all these things coded into very crazy comic book language, but all these things that I was afraid of for him, like gun violence and political strife and terrorism, all that's in there. Even images that were fleeting of a peripheral character who essentially is overseas in the Middle East. It was just 10 years ago, he saw images like that of this endless war all the time. So it’s trying to sort of bring in things that matter, to make the characters matter, in a way that's resonant. Not calculated or manipulative, but passionate, earnest. So I appreciate you guys responding so positively to that with all the variations on the response.
Anyway, I'm going to do a class about that. I want to do one inspired by that that's like, how to write for superheroes. What would you do if you were given a superhero or said, “hey, can you write this book?” And we'll pick some superhero, we'll go through it as you go, “how do you do that” depending on your interest, depending on what you want them to face and make you be brave in the face of, so it'll be fun. Anyway, thank you guys so much.
So some housekeeping stuff. Book club tonight. And out right now, not only the Night of the Ghoul trade…
Not only Barnstormers in print from Dark Horse…
But Duck and Cover, my first big collaboration with Rafael Albuquerque since American Vampire. I'm so, so proud of it. It takes all the things that we love from Americana and pulp and genre and history and all this stuff and blends it up together into something kind of crazy and new that we both feel really strongly about. So I hope you'll check it out. It's available on Comixology. If you have a Prime subscription, you can already read it. Go check it out if you can. We really love it.
If you're going to San Diego, my schedule was posted here. A couple tiny things might change, like a signing might be a little shorter, a little longer. But this is generally the schedule that's posted here. So please, if you're a paid subscriber, at the beginning of every signing for the first five to ten minutes, you guys can come in, skip whatever line there is, talk to me, whatever. If you're a Black Jackett member, you should have already gotten the address of the dinner we're having on Thursday night. It's gonna be a blast. I'm really excited about it.
If you're a paid subscriber, come to our book club tonight. It's going to be fun. Yeah, I can't thank you enough. Please, please check out Duck and Cover, and for anyone that's a paid subscriber, again, I’m gonna try my best, with Ty there this year I think it'll be a lot easier, to really give you a tour of of San Diego and just show you not just my schedule, but be like “hey, look, I'm meeting with this person.” Just give you little things along the way so you feel like you there. Always easy to sign up. Alright, see you guys soon. Bye!
Newsletter #149: Book Clubs & SDCC Schedules