Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Friday, September 29th. We’re getting closer and closer to New York Comic Con, just two weeks away. So, for Black Jackett members, we have our dinner all set up. I'm really excited. A lot of people are coming, so I'll try and have some special guests and set up some surprises. But also, if you're a paid Best Jackett member, come by any solo signing I'm doing at New York Comic Con. I'm going to post my schedule later this next week and the first 10 to 15 minutes of every solo signing are reserved for you guys to come up and get your stuff signed. So you can skip the crazy lines at New York. And if you're not a paid subscriber, it's probably worth the seven bucks to do that. If you're of any interest whatsoever in coming to see me or get anything signed, I'd recommend it.
Also, housekeeping! Monday, Monday, Monday is Final Order Cut-Off, your last chance to order Canary #1 from Dark Horse Comics.
That's a creator-owned book that I did with the great Dan Panosian. Good friend, an incredible creator.
It's a western, but it's got elements of cosmic horror in it. It's kind of almost like a True Detective kind of book.
I'm really excited about it. It's one of the ones that's gotten the best response and buzz and hits online, so I'm really thrilled to see it come out in print and grateful to Dark Horse for doing it and I'm really excited to see what you guys think of it. I hope you'll check that out!
It's also the Final Order Cut-Off for Nocterra Vol. 3, our final big trade for now! I hope you guys pick it up.
And also Tuesday, the digital trade on Comixology, the full collection of Book of Evil comes out. That's the mostly prose but with spot illustrations graphic novel I did with Jock and Emma Price about a future where 99% of the population are born psychopaths.
So I really I really love that one and I hope you'll take a look at it. It's more of a deep cut.
Also, yes, we have our writers room starting up again at Wytches. We have a date in October that we're going to begin it after New York Comic Con. I'm really excited. So wish us luck. We're gonna be bringing you some crazy horror twisted animated goodness soon. And our producer on it, Kevin Kolde, also works on Castlevania. He's done a bunch of amazing stuff like Adventure Time and everything. But they have a new spinoff that just started yesterday called Castlevania: Nocturne. It's great. I watched the first two last night. I encourage you to go check it out.
On a personal level, we had Homecoming. Our 16-year-old got all dressed up and he looked so old I almost cried, but I don't because I wrote Batman and you can't do that when you wrote Batman. I also signed up to do some superhero work for about a year from now, so I'm really excited. You'll hear a lot more about it as we go but uh yeah I guess I'm gonna put a cape back on in some capacity but I can't say what or how.
I'm starting it on White Boat in earnest with Francesco for DSTLRY. That's gonna be a lot of fun. And the Yankees did okay. Not great, but the 12-year-old is sort of already looking towards next season and really wants to get season tickets, even though he vowed he would never go back ever, ever again. Quinn got two booster shots today, one in each arm, but he still managed to, after screaming and yelling at the doctor, say that he was grateful for the lollipop and coming back soon. So it was a win, I think, overall. And we had parent-teacher conference today also at our kid's school, so it was fun. Everything is good.
Okay, so two questions today. Question number one:
Jerry asks, “what are your favorite examples of ways that you've seen writers incorporate exposition into their story without making it feel like an info dump?”
That's a great question. I mean, it depends. Exposition, I think, if you have to say something that's about the history of the treasure that you're getting, sometimes you just have to say it. There can be a lot of fun to exposition if you make it dramatic so that the exposition itself is narrativized and feels like a story. So, for example, instead of saying, like, if it’s a story about a treasure hunter who's finding an idol, it's not like, “the idol does this.” You do, “well, nobody has ever been sure that it existed but the legend is it’s at the bottom of a deep cave in the Amazon forest…” whatever. Like, you take us on a journey in the exposition so we're reading a story as opposed to just being plopped in as facts. So narrativize it, dramatize it if you're going to do it as pure exposition. Also if you can have characters talking about it and having different points of view:
“What do you mean? That thing isn't real!”
“I'm telling you i heard it is. Somebody died trying to find it!”
You see what I'm saying? Dramatize it by doing it in dialogue back and forth so it doesn't just feel like a drop. That's another way of doing it. Also, definitely keep in mind as the writer, there are a lot of ways of telling the story visually without needing to say anything. If there's a way that you can encourage your artist or your co-creator essentially to do some of that lifting by doing cutaway panels, insets, whatever kind of visual tricks that they want to pull to tell that part of the story, that's helpful too. So those are three ways of mitigating info dumps.
Ken asks, “you have comics at a bunch of different publishers. How do you choose which projects you're going to do with which publisher?”
Another great question. Well, what I'm trying to do over the last few years, like I said, was really just explore creatively and have a moment when I allowed myself to really be elastic and just push myself into different creative neighborhoods that I hadn't really tried. So a lot of experimentation, a lot of genres that I hadn't tried before—historical fiction, romance, young adult, Western mixed with cosmic horror, like I was saying, more prose, all kinds of stuff that just pushed me creatively. And the goal was to really try and create buckets of the books. So Comixology for me was really a place where I could do modular books, like, do a number of stories that had a beginning, middle, and an end that we could always return to to do more but felt like they were a full experiment in it of themselves. So it was almost about trying to pull something off with a co-creator or friend that I didn’t know if we could do because we hadn’t tried that kind of thing or format or genre before and just push each other to make something really special that we felt was one of the best books we could possibly make as a team. And that was the project. And we’d always have them be things that push the bounds of credibility as well. I wanted them to almost be fantastic stories with supernatural elements, monsters. It was all big, imaginative, widescreen stuff. Even when they were small, intimate stories, I wanted them to have a big backdrop, a big canvas, like in Barnstormers. So that was the goal of Comixology and those books come out from Dark Horse in print.
What I wanted to do with IDW was to have a place where I would only tell stories that had no supernatural elements. It would just be a place where I could go and do thrillers or noirs or that kind of thing. So that's what's coming up with Dungeon next month. And that was the deal with Wildfire, the book about a bunch of women incarcerated in a prison in California that are firefighters as part of the prison program and decide to pull off a heist. This one, Dungeon, is about a serial killer who keeps people in dungeons for most of their lives and it's his way of manipulating everything. So it's a really terrifying kind of Se7en or Silence of the Lambs-type thriller. But there's no supernatural elements.
Image is traditionally where I've done more ongoing stuff if I can, like Nocterra, Undiscovered Country, and even though we only have an arc and a half of Wytches, that kind of thing, so I'm excited to bring that back. So I try and do more work on longer-form things over there. What I'm trying to say is the goal is to have a place where you do a certain kind of book or have a certain kind of project or ideology to the work so that when it's all collected together, it sort of fits in one neighborhood that way.
But still, use different publishers to explore different things. And also, they have different publishing deals, they have different support systems, they have different ways of paying you, they have different creator deals for your partners. So all of it is just what fits you best. Some projects are just better suited to have page rates and upfront money and other projects are fun to take a big risk on and do something where there isn't that stuff. So anyway that's kind of the idea of why I work at different publishers. Each one has a different character, structure, feel, people, and also allow for different kinds of mission statements.
Alright guys, so again, New York Comic Con coming up. Next week where we're going to talk to Tom King. I'll be back on Tuesday. Have a great weekend!
S
Newsletter #159: Two Question FRIDAY!