Newsletter #158: #WGAStrong

Quick reminder to all of you about the Devil’s Cut signing I’m doing w/ James Tynion IV at the Grand Central Midtown Comics tomorrow, September 27th, at 5pm EST!

Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Tuesday, September 26th. It is rainy and miserable and the Yankees have been eliminated from playoff contention, so I have sons, especially our 12-year-old, who are very angry and have renounced the team entirely, but I'm sure we will be back next year to go see many games. But it is a moment of rage in the boyhood world. Our 16-year-old Jack and I have just sent the first issue of By a Thread #1, the comic that we wrote together for Comixology, off to the digital printer.

That’s co-created with the great Valeria Favacia and we'll all be at New York Comic Con promoting it. So I hope you'll give it a shot. It's his first finished published work. He's very into writing. He runs the writing club at school and he takes a lot of extracurricular writing stuff. He’s probably going to be far better than me very, very soon. But anyway, I hope you'll give it a shot. I love the comic and it's a tremendous amount of fun and it's got a real youthful energy to it all around.

Anyway, aside from that, I was at the Readers and Writers Festival over the weekend in Milford, Pennsylvania. My parents have had a small house nearby there since I was very little. My dad grew up in the city up on 181st Street and my mom spent some of her childhood in New York City also, and I think they hadn't planned on raising kids in the city. And then when I was born and then my sister was born four years after, they felt the need to try and find something, even though they didn't have a ton of money at that time, that would give us some kind of escape from the city. It was the 80s and the city was a bit different. I loved it. As a kid, I thought it was like a magical place to grow up. I had friends from like, all different backgrounds and all over the world. But now as a parent, you look back through that kind of veil of nostalgia and say, “yeah, it was kind of dangerous at times.”

I mean, we went to an arcade called Playland, if there are any old city heads here, on 42nd Street and Broadway. And it was sort of a rite of passage to get flashed there. 42nd Street and that whole area was very different. We used to go down to Chinatown and the South Street Seaport and all of that a lot and get firecrackers and Chinese stars. It was the days that ninjas were really big on TV and you could go to some of these stores and just buy weapons. I had a belt. I was like, a chubby kid at nine years old and had a belt with a Chinese star that unscrewed from it in case anybody messed with me and in my head, I was going to take them down. They were very different, ridiculous times.

Anyway, they got this house to get us away from all of that. And we love going up there. I've always loved going up there. It's very, very rural. And it's also strangely eclectic and artsy in the town. You should go visit if you're anywhere near Milford. It's really adorable and Port Jervis right nearby has a fantastic comic store, I did a quick signing over there, called Haven for Heroes. It's a really, really good shop. Been going there a very, very long time. Anyway, but the Readers and Writers Festival, they have it annually. They have a Black Bear Festival in October for film. It's just a really good, inclusive, diverse community.

So I got to go on stage. They refurbished this old movie theater from the 30s not long ago. It was a really nice space. I got up and I got to speak to the great Joe Ott, who's one of the managers at Zapp! Comics in New Jersey, another terrific store, about my career and about how the area inspired Wytches, which I hope was a good thing to talk about because I didn't know if local people would want to hear like, “where you live has inspired one of the most horrific stories I've ever told!” But anyway, they seem to like it. And it was a real thrill. I got to hang out with Harvey Fierstein, who was the keynote speaker right after me. And he was just wonderful. He and his dog were very sweet and had very nice things to say about us and couldn't have been more gracious.

And I got to hang out with my old buddy Owen King, who I haven't seen in a couple of years, but who was the one who did the anthology Who Can Save Us Now?, which published the very story, “The 13th Egg” that comic editors Mark Doyle and Jeanine Schaefer noticed, which got them to come ask me to pitch for comics. So inadvertently, I kind of owe Owen my whole career in comics.

And he's just a great friend and a fantastic writer. And as a side note, you know who drew the spot illustrations for that story? A very young Chris Burnham, which was cool to see when I look back.

“The 13th Egg” spot illustration by Chris Burnham

But it was a great weekend, great time. And now I'm back, and we have New York Comic Con in a couple weeks. Really huge. I'll be there all four days. If you're in the Black Jacket Club, we've emailed out a survey. We're going to be doing a dinner for you guys. We're going to have some giveaways. We'll have some special guests. If you're a paid Best Jackett subscriber, you get to cut the lines. It's going to be really fun. It should be a blast.

Also a bit of housekeeping, tomorrow night I'm doing a big signing with the great James Tynion IV, my fantastic friend and the best writer in comics in my opinion, at Midtown Comics by Grand Central at 5:00 in the afternoon, 5 to 7pm until they close. There's no tickets anymore there. There used to be ticketed events, but now it's just first come first serve. So get down there. It's for the release of DSTLRY’s The Devil's Cut, but feel free to bring more stuff. We always have a great time. I hope you'll show up and come say hi.

Alright, so a couple quick things. The writer's strike is over (or not over, sorry, but there's a tentative deal). After five plus months of being on strike it looks like the strike might be coming to an end, which is fantastic news. Although I feel everybody has the same feelings of both gratitude, excitement, elation, and also terror about getting back to work in that zone because everyone has taken other jobs or created lives for themselves without TV and film work in their own way. So we all couldn't be more excited to get back in and also really scared. But I'm fantastically thrilled to get back into the writers room for Wytches. That will probably be happening in the next few weeks, I imagine. But I think the rumor is that the Writers Guild is going to stand in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, which means we won't go back to work until there's a deal for the actors as well, which I believe in, too. My assumption is that that will get figured out relatively quickly at this point. But if not, the room could take longer to reassemble.

As a primer for anyone wondering what writers were striking for again, because I know I did something on this a long time ago, but it's been almost half a year. The idea is that our last contract was pre-streaming. It was from, I think, 10+ years ago. But the last WGA contract, before I was a WGA member, essentially dealt with DVDs and dealt with syndication, dealt with everything that has to do with cable, TV, and film as it used to be. But with the rise of streaming, there was no revision of this contract. So essentially now, if you're a writer in TV and you work for a streaming show, all you get paid for, pretty much, unless you are a particular kind of showrunner and get a great deal of some kind, but if you're a staff writer or you're somebody that's just a general writer on a show, all you ever get is what you make in the episodic creation. So you just get what you get in that room and that's it. And those rates have gone down pretty much because there's so many different shows to write on.

So the problem with that is in the old days, if you had a show that was a hit that went into syndication that was on reruns or that went to DVD or had sequels, there were built-in protections that were long-standing aspects of the comprehensive WGA deal that gave you as a writer in that room, and somebody who should be credited with the creation of a hit show, a small, small, small percentage of those profits. So nothing huge, but you got residuals, you got royalties, you were making some money off the thing that you made that everybody loved. But nowadays you can be a writer on something like Stranger Things and make nothing except what you're paid to actually write the episode.

So you have these shows that are tremendous hits, like everything that you see on streaming that has three, four, five seasons. And a lot of the time, all the writers are making is what they get for the episodes, none of the money that the studio gets for all the other things that come from streaming hits. Even if something becomes a movie, like The Boogeyman, that was supposed to be released on TV but then goes to theaters and makes a whole other bucket full of money, the writers on that show or film don’t necessarily see any of that. So the strike was largely about just getting fair wages, fair compensation, not some huge windfall but some tiny percentage of the profits if something does really well. And you’ve seen a lot of people on strike, actors and writers, but actors like Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, who’ve never seen a residual check from Breaking Bad on streaming when it hit Netflix. So for all the times it's viewed, he doesn't get anything. And I can pretty much bet all the writers are in the same boat, if not worse than him. So that's kind of the situation that everybody was striking against. I'm very excited to see, it sounds like there is a deal reached that rectifies that.

But again, what does this mean for us? This means that I will be going back into that Wytches writer's room to showrun it with the great Marion Dayre, who worked on Better Call Saul and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Jeff Howard from the Mike Flanagan group who's done Midnight Mass and House on Haunted Hill, Harrison Rivers, great playwright, and Bornila Chatterjee, another great writer who's done film and TV for a while. We'll be going back into the room with Kevin Kolde, our great producer who does Castlevania and Adventure Time, a lot of other great animated shows, sometime in the next month plus, I assume. That means that I will still be doing office hours, I will still be doing everything we're doing, still teaching, but this time around I'm just going to be doing less books.

My creative project, if you want sort of the aerial view, was I got out of DC in 2020 and all I had done was superheroes for so long and I did a little bit on the side, I did American Vampire, every now and then I wrote a book on the side like A.D. After Death, but I fought really hard, as I've told you guys, for carve-outs to be able to do a lot of indie stuff on the side of DC. And I never had the energy because it just took up so much brainpower and manpower and all of it to do the stuff at DC we were doing for various reasons that I never used it. So when I left, I was just like, “I want to do every idea and surprise myself and stay the most exciting writer to me that I can be.” It’s the way I use that rule in our class. The two rules, again, are:

1. Write the story that you'd like to pick up the most and find today in the world.

2. Try and be the most exciting writer to yourself that you can be.

So for me, that meant doing things I'd never done with creators that I love, creators I'd never worked with, creators that would push me into new spaces, some of whom I'd worked with a lot but had never gotten to do creator-owned with, working in genres I'd never done before. So the slate of books that we did at Comixology before Wytches was a thing, before we got it greenlit, before we knew it was going to be a show, was just me exploring and getting to do all of these stories that I'm so proud of.

I mean, I really believe that the last few years I've put out some of the best stuff of my career because of the incredible work of my co-creators and the ways in which we tried to push each other into zones that challenged us creatively. So I got to do historical fiction like Barnstormers and we were fortunate enough to win an Eisner for that. And now we have Canary coming out, which is this cosmic horror western, which I can't wait for you guys to see, and Book of Evil, which is 90% prose, and Dudley Datson, which is an all-ages book, which I've never tried to do before. So it was me just being like, “I want to do everything I never got to do.” Now we're coming to the end of that slate, the books are all finished digitally except for a couple lettering passes on the last ones and we have a couple more down the line, but generally we're coming to the tail end of everything that we had signed up to do in that first wave of books.

My goal now is to just really drill down and make sure I'm only working on a couple things at a time to make a lot of room for Wytches, but also just to sort of change tacks. I feel like I've gotten to do so many different kinds of projects. I get to work at IDW and do grounded genre stories, do crazy genre mashups at Comixology, do ongoings at Image like Noctera. Now it's time to be like, “I'm going to do two books, possibly three, but generally one or two, and make those projects kind of the only things I have in comics for a while.” So that's kind of what you're going to see over the course of the next year. I do have some superhero stuff now lined up that I'm really, really excited about. I can't talk about it for quite a long time because it's really nascent and just forming, but I'm really excited about it and can't wait to share it with you guys. I'm nervous and also over the moon about the chance to do something kind of big and comprehensive.

But the idea, again, is to do White Boat with DSTLRY and make sure that's one of the best things I've done. I want to really dig in with Francesco Francavilla and make this book special. I’m gonna do Dark Spaces: Dungeon, which we're actually towards the end of, writing-wise. Dungeon comes out next month. I want to have that be something special. And then as we go forward with Wytches. Again, I’ll just have one or two books on the stands at a time. So you'll see less of me on the stands, but I'm going to keep it going. I'm definitely going to keep all the Best Jackett and the Black Jackett stuff going. I'm really excited. But this phase of my career is about focusing down on just a couple projects at a time rather than kind of a creative explosion of energy that was pent up while I was at DC.

I know it's two question Tuesday, but I think I'll do the two questions on Friday, just because this has run a little bit long in my long explanation of both the strike and where I'm at creatively. Again, if you can come by this signing tomorrow at Midtown, come by. We always have a blast. James is the best. And then I'll do a post on Friday with two questions. And we have Tom King, we're going to be speaking to him next week for paid subscribers. And then the week after Comic-Con, we're gonna do a class. So there's tons of stuff coming for paid subscribers (including something special just below). And yeah, and free subscribers to all of you guys, I love all of you. Alright, thanks!