Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, September 19th (I had to look and check the date), and I'm back from Zapp Con over the weekend. It was super fun. I was there on Batman Day with Tom King and Amy Chu, and we got a good crowd and then got to go out and have really good Korean food together, the three of us, and bring our own beer and then get completely lost on the freeways of New Jersey, which was its own Batman adventure. But it was great. Thank you to everybody that came out and saw us. It was a great day.
And now it's a big announcement, some housekeeping stuff today. I'm going to make this post short. We're going to reopen the Black Jackett Club, but just for about 10 to maybe 15 people. We're already at like, 130. We really can't manage a lot more than that for it. So in case you don't know what it is, just to give you a quick update, it's our highest tier. It's a few hundred dollars a year and the biggest thing that it does is it gives you office hours with me. So you can meet with me as many times as you want. I have office hours basically twice a week and we do about 10 minute meetings and I will look at your work. A lot of people show me drafts of things. We go over them. I've helped people complete their comics, whether it's in script form, whether they're in lettering, but also pitches for things. I try and do introductions for people when they're ready for editors or agents for that kind of thing. It gives me a chance to really connect with you and meet you where you are in your trajectory. And I have other people who are part of the Black Jackett Club who love to just come in and talk comics, just talk Batman or talk that week's pull list and it's great too. It's a chance for me to connect with you guys in a real way and I really love it. It's my favorite part, that and the actual class of doing all this. So that's the biggest thing. It gives you access to me, show me your work, go back and forth privately and get my help on anything you need in comics.
The other things it does, you get three exclusive variant covers that’s signed by me and my co-creators. We're doing Canary by Dan Panosian and me, that's out in November. And then we'll do White Boat, which is out by me and Francesco Francavilla sometime around March. And they'll just be special covers and signed by us and you'll get those. The third one is probably something that we're going to announce soon. We'll see what you guys want the most. And we throw in all kinds of extra stuff during the year. We throw in an extra trade, we try and add in things like that. And the other thing it gets you is you get to send 10 books to me to sign with the CGC option (you just have to pay more for CGC if you want). That's coming up next month with full instructions.
So next month Black Jackett Club, present members and people that sign up now, you'll get the chance to send 10 books of any size, trades or comics, to me to sign and we'll get them back to you within a couple months and then right after that regular paid subscribers in the tier below Black Jackett that are just regular Best Jackett paid subscribers, you guys will all get to send two books to me free of cost (besides shipping). I don't know if we'll have the CGC option there because there’s so many of you, but we will do it right afterwards. It'll probably be some time right around the end of the year or right after the new year.
Also with Black Jackett you have two dinners a year. You get a dinner in New York and you get a dinner in San Diego and we pay for it. It's a blast. We usually pay drinks too if there are not too many people. So each one of those things like, a variant cover signed by me and my co-creator that's a special edition or a special cover it's at least a $30-40 value. You know doing that kind of thing like a class, I've done it before as a workshops for ~$500-1000 over the course of a couple of weeks. And then the sending in 10 books, a raw signature at a con is usually about $10, the price is set by the convention or the organizers, not me. So again, that's about $100. So just from the stuff that we're offering up front, you get way more than the $300 buy in price. But more than this, the chance to actually connect and work on stuff together to me is the big value of it.
You also get a shirt. We're printing shirts and if you come to the cons you get one, and you get everything else you get with the class. You get all the classes that we've done archived, you get to skip the line at cons, all that stuff. So if you want to get it we're gonna open it Wednesday at 12pm EST and we're probably only gonna keep it open for about 24 hours or so, just seeing how many people sign up, but as soon as we hit about 10 or 15 we're gonna have to close it. So if you want to do it, really look for it Wednesday at 12pm EST. Again, we only do it rarely and we can only fit so many people, so thank you guys so much again. You can get it as a gift for somebody else, and it's a great time for you if you're a free subscriber, if you want to bump up to be a paid subscriber, get all the classes.
It's a great time for that too, because Thursday night, this Thursday, 9.30 p.m. EST, we're going to do our master class—How to Write a Superhero Comic. We're going to use four comics that we'll give you access to at the bottom of this post—Last Knight on Earth #1, a Batman comic by me and Greg Capullo, we're going to do Joshua Williamson and Jamal Campbell's Superman #1, we're going to do Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero's Birds of Prey #1, and we're going to do Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye #1. So we'll look at all of those books. We're going to talk about the priorities of superhero comics and how to do them. It'll kind of be like the class I did on mystery.
And then the week after next, we're going to post a conversation with superstar writer Tom King, who has Wonder Woman #1 out today. Incredible writer, really fascinating guy. We'll do a class that's all about writing comics and his career, but also just talking craft and all that. So it'll be really fun.
And then in October right after New York Comic Con, we'll do a class where we look at your work and published work as well. So we've got a ton of stuff for paid subscribers coming up. Black Jackett, if you want it, again, it’s Wednesday at 12pm EST. Best Jackett paid subscriptions, never a better time to sign up, especially with New York coming, you get to skip the line at any of these crazy cons and come up and see me. And again, if you sign up for Black Jackett, we're doing a dinner at New York. So we're going to take a headcount right after we open and close the Black Jackett Club. So check it out. Thank you guys again so much for all of it.
Also huge news, Nocterra #16, the last issue of this cycle of Nocterra, is out tomorrow. I'm so so grateful for the support on this series. This was one that was like the little engine that could. We wanted to keep it going for a few arcs and we weren't sure we'd be able to do it and you guys just showed up right and left and made it a big hit for us and we love it. We'd love to keep it going longer, but Tony really had a calling to do Edenwood, which I think is a fantastic book and I'm really glad that he's getting to do that. You should 100% go pick that up when it comes out. It's a fantastic read. And we do want to come back to the book someday. We’d do it like American Vampire, sort of taking a break and then coming back in full force at another point. But for right now we wanted to sort of end it on a note that could give you a sense of closure while leaving things a little bit open-ended for future stories. I really hope you enjoy the ride, it was one of my favorite experiences in comics. So thank you for picking it up tomorrow from Image Comics.
And because it's Tuesday we'll do two questions, Two Question Tuesday. So the first one:
Christian asks “what happens to an option right if a show scheduled to be made gets indefinitely shelved by a streamer? Do the rights ever come back or is it in limbo?”
That's a great question. So when you have the underlying rights to your comic, like if you make something in the creator-owned space and you have the rights, you don't work with a company that takes the rights, or even if they do and they go out with the rights or you go out with the rights, you get something called an option. If a studio wants it or a producer wants it, anyone who gets interested in making it in Hollywood can make you an offer. And an option is usually about 18 months to three years. And during that period, they're essentially renting your property, your book, so that they can try and get a director or writer or producers, enough people excited to do it and signed on to it that they can get a greenlight from whoever it is they are looking to make it it with. It might be them themselves, it might be their company if it's Amazon or Fox or a studio that's renting it from you, then internally they're trying to get enough people attached so they themselves can greenlight it. If it's a producer or a team of producers or an independent company that doesn't make movies but packages movies, then what they might be doing is trying to get enough talent attached to it that they can go to a bigger studio and say, “hey, we have all this stuff ready. Will you make this with us?” And then if the studio says yes, then they'll purchase it.
If they don't get their stuff together by the end of the period they're renting your property, your book, it comes right back to you. They usually have a built-in option to get it again for the same amount of money for the same amount of time. So it could be theirs for six years or three years, depending on what your option range is, and they have to pay again. And that happens a lot. Or they could decide they're not going to continue with it and it comes back to you. But at the end of that whole period, either way, it comes back to you and you can go back out with it. If they've done significant work on it and another company gets it, sometimes they have to pay for that work if they want to use some of it. There's different factors. But yes, the rights come back to you after the option period is over. If they purchase your property, meaning like Wytches, if they greenlight or something because they do get enough people attached that they want to make it and then they buy it from you, that's a much longer period. That's usually a seven to ten year period that they have it for. It's more difficult on the other side of that to take the rights out without having costs to pay if somebody else takes it from you. That means there's a real commitment to make it if they greenlight it. Anyway, so that's that question.
Second question:
Lyndon asks, “why do you think manga is exploding in popularity right now, and do you think there are any lessons we can take from manga that would be helpful to growing western comics and audiences?”
What a great question. Yes, I think manga is exploding for a couple of reasons. I think because there's tremendous access to it. I think that the digital platform on which it exists, Shonen Jump and Crunchyroll, give tremendous browsability to young readers, which is what I was really promoting with Comixology and I believe deeply in as a necessary thing for the expansion of Western comics. I also think kids and young audiences are used to browsing everything they consume digitally now (music, movies, everything) and then purchasing the more collectable edition in a physical format. So I think there’s just a huge onramp because you can just read so much manga online. But I also think the nature of it, it's immersive and there's multiple volumes and you start from volume one, and it's also very heightened in its emotions and it's heightened in its stakes and its action. It can be very sincere or very campy or very tongue-in-cheek but it always has this kind of, not always, like there's some books like Monster or other ones that’re underplayed. But for the most part, especially for the younger readers, it has very elevated stakes and emotions, very high concept stuff. So I think those lessons are important ones in storytelling to bring, especially if you’re doing stuff that can be a little more high concept and bombastic. But in terms of the format and the deliverable aspect of how they do manga—physical volumes that are done and collected that way and give a huge pool of reading to somebody as they dive in and also in the digital sphere where there's just so much browsability. I think those are lessons that we can absolutely take on two levels, on a storytelling level and on a business level for American comics.
Okay, so again, couple more things, really quick housekeeping, I'm signing with James Tynion next week at Midtown Comics on the 27th. We're signing for DSTLRY. Come by, it'll be awesome. I haven't seen him in person in a while and we'll have a blast.
And this weekend actually, this coming weekend on the 22nd, I'll be in Milford, PA. My parents, they've had a cabin in that area for a very long time, since I was like five years old. But they have a Readers and Writers Festival and I am going to be there on Saturday at the Milford Theater, this antique movie theater, doing a lecture in the mid-afternoon at 2:15pm EST. So if you're anywhere near Milford, PA, come by. Harvey Fierstein is doing one after me. So it's a really fun time. It'll be a good weekend, just come by, and thank you guys again!
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