Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, the 1st of August, I cannot believe July is over. Last month of summer coming, crazy. I'm taking our older boys, Jack and Emmett, on a father-son trip at the end of next week out to LA and surprise them with a little bit of a trip to Vegas, they've never been anywhere near the desert so it should be fun and extremely hot, but wish us luck. Anyway, I wanted to do a quick post today. I like the habit of doing Tuesdays and Fridays the best I can, but also, I've been sort of thinking of this weird theme in my head and I wanted to apply it to comics and also the creation of comics. But forgive me for anybody who is not a sports fan. I wasn't until a few years ago at all and then our 12 year-old Emmett, back when he was about nine, became obsessed with baseball, first through baseball cards because he's into statistics and rankings and all of this stuff that he can obsess over. And then because we just fell in love with the game and we're Yankees fans, we're in New York, my dad is a lifelong Yankees fan and grew up not far from Yankee Stadium, we started going to the games. And then we started watching the games and now we're like full blown baseball fans all around where I know more about baseball than I should and it takes up a huge part of my brain.
But for those of you who are not baseball fans at all, the CliffsNotes version of the Yankees the last couple years is that they seem to be like, completely unwilling to change directions, even when that direction is absolutely not working for them. This season, for the first time in a long time, they're deep in last place as we're entering the last couple of months of the season with very little hope of making the playoffs. And yet, they have all these great players on their team, namely Aaron Judge being the captain and probably the best player in all of baseball, sorry, Shohei Ohtani fans, he's amazing, too. But the thing that's fascinating about the way that they're managing the team into the ground is that they don't seem to change direction no matter what. They have a certain set of beliefs about, using analytics, when you take a pitcher out, even if they're doing great, because their odds have a right-handed pitcher being worse against a left-handed batter than a left-handed pitcher.
They seem to have beliefs about moving people around in the order but always keeping some of the veterans in the same spots, even if those veterans clearly have had something go wrong with their season and are hitting horribly. It's this very strange stubbornness that is almost like, they won't give up on the ideology that they began with, or they won't change it or alter it. It's really running the team into the ground in a way that's almost like a car crash in slow motion that you can't turn away from, because it's just like unbelievable that the sort of highest payroll franchise in the American League is in last place consistently this year.
But the thing that was interesting to me was I was thinking about the importance of flexibility and fluidity, both in superhero comics and an indie comics. And right now, I'm working on a little bit of both, without getting into too much detail. I've been thinking a lot about superhero comics, without getting too far into that, because it's still nascent. I've been thinking a lot a lot about indie comics, creator-owned comics, because I'm working on a couple. I'm coming out of a period where I was doing a pretty full slate of them for Comixology and then Dark Horse and Image and IDW. And I've really loved it, and now I have a slightly lighter schedule, lighter slate, and I have a couple of books that I want to have be very big in scope, one I really look at as an ongoing, and it's underway right now with an artist I just adored and have worked with a couple times.
Another one is a book that I was sort of thinking about, that I'll talk about now, for DSTLRY that I had an idea for and I knew I kind of wanted to do something big with but I wasn't sure how. And I want to walk you through the process of being flexible, assuming that it was not easy for me to learn how to be with ideas that I had in comics until maybe halfway through my career at DC. The thing in comics is that a lot of the time you'll get thrown curveballs right and left, especially if you work for one of the big two companies or a licensed company. They'll say to you “actually, you know what? We have this other writer coming in, we need you to shorten this from six issues to three,” or “we really need you to use Casey Jones instead of Shredder in this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic,” or “Godzilla can't actually be as old as you want them to be,” which is the basis of your story for whatever, whatever. All those things are completely plausible and not unreasonable asks in that zone. And I've said to you before, you have to have a really strong sense about what your story is about, because if you know what it's about, you can always adjust. But that can also be true and you're not being thrown curveballs, you're just trying to figure out the story. So it's a really useful thing when things just aren't going where you want, like for the Yankees, for yourself.
And so for this story “White Boat,” this book I'm doing at DSTLRY with Francesco Francavilla, one of my longtime collaborators and good friends. We love doing horror comics together, and I had this idea for it. I live in a port town and in this town every once in a while, a giant yacht will come into this small port. It's not a wealthy town, but used to be a fishing and seafaring town, there's a lot of old captain's houses and stuff, I love it. But it's just a little local harbor with most people that are residents having small motorboats, they take out on the weekends. But every once in a while, this like, mega-boat will come in and it sits off, too heavy, honestly, to be like, right up in the harbor, I assume, but it sits off in the distance and hovers there and it's huge. It just like, dwarfs everything else. And I started thinking about that kind of strange insulation of wealth and that level, that stratospheric level, of wealth that sort of offers a complete disconnect from reality and affords a kind of bubble you can walk around in and almost by force of will create a reality that is individuated to your own tastes.
I wanted to write a book about somebody who winds up on one of these boats and finds it to be the beginning of an experience that takes them inside one of these bubbles. I love movies like Knives Out and things like Succession, the show. I love that peek into a window where wealth and power is sort of both astronomical, corrupting, strange, wondrous, terrifying, all those things. Part of it is that, not to get too personal, but I grew up in New York City and wound up going to a high school where there was a lot of very, very wealthy kids. And it was fascinating to me, just the lifestyle and the houses and the strange problems and the undercurrents and all of it. Just as a sort of, again, almost like an anthropological experiment, just seeing the different experience that people in that bubble have. And so anyway, I wanted to write a book about somebody who winds up being invited onto one of these boats and then has kind of a horrifying and wondrous experience that takes them someplace really scary and Lovecraftian, and ties together a lot of seafaring lore and all kinds of stuff. And so I started working on it and I had a short for it that was in The Devil’s Cut for DSTLRY, which again, thank you so much for buying those, I can't get over the fact that they sold over 50,000 copies, which is absolutely insane and wonderful.
But I kept working on it and working on it. And I talked to Francesco and the idea of keeping the book on a boat, as much as it gave me this incredible haunted house that this main character was essentially walking through and finding really startling and almost unbelievable things inside the boat that pertained to his own life and pertain to history and was almost like a labyrinth he couldn't escape and the boat was taking him somewhere he didn't know. And all of that is basically in the short, so I'm not giving anything away. If you don't want big spoilers, all of that is there in that initial teaser. So any trailer for the book or any ad is going to say these things, so don't worry about getting too spoiled. But all of a sudden, I was like, you know what, this initial framework that I had for this belief that it needs to stay on this boat and be this claustrophobic inward spiral and Nautilus of fear and claustrophobia and revelation, those things could change. And then I could take it off the boat and have it actually arrive somewhere that would open up the core idea, and the things that were appealing to me about the initial premise, to a whole new set of possibilities.
But that jump of being like, it doesn't need to stay on the boat, it can go somewhere else, it's very hard because for a long time you're working and working, and what if I give a boat a section beneath the boat, and a boat beneath the boat, and all the stuff that you don't know, and a reverse city beneath it that you don't know is there, like an iceberg where the boat is just the top. And with all those things, I'm using them in different ways. And I love the book dearly. But I think it's one of the strongest things I've worked on.
But letting go, that architecture, to really be what it wants to be, you have to kind of allow it to go someplace you didn't expect and to sort of play to the strengths of the things that are working in it so far, and just sort of say to yourself, “look, there are things that are unexpected and those are the joys of discovery and there are things that aren't working, and that's okay. You let those things go.” But hanging on to the same belief system about it and the same mission from the very beginning, or not even mission but strategy really, just winds up holding it back. And now all of a sudden it's blossomed and it's this whole new expansion of the original ideas that allow me to explore all kinds of things throughout history and the present.
I'm very good friends with a guy named Noel Heroux, who was in a band, Hooray for Earth, which I really love, and he was in a Mass Gothic with his wife. And we've become very close over the last six or seven years. And he knows the story and I was talking to him about it the other night while we were sitting outside his shed, and he was like, “what if I do musical accompaniment for it?” And then I was like, “let's do it!” And so he's gonna do a musical accompaniment for it, a soundtrack, just for fun. And as we were talking about it, and he was playing me these like, deep sea sounds and all of these sounds he's mutated from underwater deep oceanic noises, I was like, “I have another idea for another part of the story.”
And so the point I'm trying to make with all this rambling is that letting go a little bit and being able to say, “I approached this maybe the wrong way,” or “I approached this in a way that limited it, didn't play to the strengths of the pieces I had,” and instead adapting and turning it into something that leans into all the things that are really glowing and feel energetic and sparking and right, whether you're on a superhero book or you're on an indie book, that's such an important lesson. Like, for me, it's almost like a lesson in humility. It's being able to say, “I was wrong when I approached it this way and I'm going to let that go and try this.” And when you can do that, as long as you're holding on to the core belief system as your compass, things usually turn out so much better. Again, for me, the core belief system here was that I want to tell a story about somebody who enters a bubble through this seafaring journey of extreme wealth that offers a peek into things that are almost godlike in their horror, in their wonder, in their possibility, all of that stuff that feels almost Lovecraftian but also really grounded in lore and myth and science and all those things. And if you keep those things, if you keep your North Star, letting go of some of the strategy, or the kind of approach you had, is a good thing.
Anyway, Yankees. Aaron Boone, if you're listening to this, because I know you're a huge fan of comics, and you I'm sure you listen to this all the time, please, let go. Let go and play to your strengths. It's like child abuse that I'm watching the Yankees with my kids.
Oh, a couple quick things. I wanted to just throw out a couple books that I've really enjoyed lately to you guys. Again, I'll have Ty put in the credits just because I'm awful with whole teams in terms of remembering everybody's name. Like, as a writer, I generally focus on the writer as the person that is attracting me to the book. I love artists, don't get me wrong, but I mean, I'm like, oh, I'm a big fan of this person, I'm going to see what they're doing. So a couple books that I've really enjoyed lately—Garth Ennis is writing a book over at AWA with his 303, Chronicles of Wormwood, and Crossed collaborator Jacen Burrows called The Ribbon Queen. I think there's only one issue out, but I read it and I really, really loved it.
It's a police procedural that suddenly turns really dark and twisted, and Garth is an unbelievable writer and always worth checking out.
Another book, Swan Songs. It's really new to me. It's Martin Simmonds, actually, going against what I just said. Martin Simmonds is someone I love as the artist on Department of Truth with brother James Tynion IV. And I saw his art and I was like, I'm gonna check this out.
And it's fantastic. So again, I think there's only one out so far, but it's almost an anthology book where it's a series of stories that all approach endings. It's all about endings. And I won't give away more than that. It's written by W. Maxwell Prince of Ice Cream Man fame. It's out from Image and yeah, it's really really fascinating. It's almost like a poetic kind of comic and of course the art is out of control.
One other book I wanted to bring up was The Hunger and the Dusk:
G. Willow Wilson, I've been a fan of hers since Air over at Vertigo back in the Karen Berger days. Obviously she did Ms. Marvel and she's done a ton of stuff since, but she's amazing and it's high fantasy really really done well. I mean if you like anything that's like Dungeons & Dragons-type fantasy, Game of Thrones fantasy, this book is killer and really, really just precisely done. Beautiful art as well by Chris Wildgoose, who worked with friends Grant Morrison on Proctor Valley Road and Si Spurrier on Alienated.
So go check those out. Check out Knight Terrors by my buddy Josh Williamson over DC! His Batman tie-in he did with Guillem March and Tomeu Morey releases its last issue today, so go pick that up!
I feel like DC is is really rocking out with Dawn of DC. And yeah, I hope everything's going well with you guys and talk soon!
Finally, here’s a real quick survey for all you subscribers, free or paid. We’re going to be launching some merch on our webstore pretty soon, so I wanted to gauge your interest as we get going on that. As I teased last post, we’ve got an initial batch of shirts, with the idea being that we’d have variants for all the Best Jackett books as logos within the BJP symbol.
So be honest, this’ll be really important as we determine how much inventory we’ll have ordered going forward!
Newsletter #151: Be Flexible, Yankees!