Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Friday, December 15th. My God, it is 10 days away from Christmas and I can't believe it. Our house is all a frenzy. We have our tree, we're all set, we're waiting on packages. Our 16-year-old is still in finals hell. Our 12-year-old is glued to social media to see if the Yankees get this amazing Japanese pitcher, Yamamoto. And our 4-year-old is obsessed with the Christmas elf and 80s video games. All of a sudden, like, Rampage is his new favorite game because we have an arcade downstairs with a Library of Congress game access on it that I got them for Christmas maybe three or four years ago. I probably have pictures of it.
But anyway, a couple of quick housekeeping things. Monday night, 9.30 p.m. EST, we're going to do ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas.’ We're doing a class on writing horror for comics. It'll be fun. I plan on doing a couple of these, but this one will feature work by Philip Kennedy Johnson and Al Ewing and James Tynion and you guys, student work by you, too. But we'll talk about all the different ways that horror has advantages (and some disadvantages, but some big advantages) in comics, in my opinion. I think it's going to be really fun.
Also, I'm supposed to fly down to Florida tomorrow to sign your books if you're in the Black Jacket Club, but if you check the weather, it looks like there is a very big storm coming up from Florida starting at 8 a.m., when I'm supposed to land, essentially. So I am sort of looking at it a little worried that I might not make it down there.
If that's the case, I will go right after Christmas. But I have my tickets. I planned on flying down there tomorrow, first thing in the morning, signing all books by the hotel, by the airport, and then flying back the same day. So I will update you on that, but I am watching the weather carefully.
So I wanted to do a couple end of year posts on the state of comics but also some pop culture thoughts exploring things that are in the zeitgeist in a pop cultural way right now and seem to play out in comics in interesting ways. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Godzilla Minus One and something that got me thinking about For me, Godzilla Minus One wasn't only this great movie, and it was an incredible experience seeing it with Emmett, our 12-year-old, at 10:30 at night with giant buckets of popcorn. It was fantastic. But it's also sort of representative of this kind of, and I might be wrong and it might just be my own theory, but a new moment in pop culture. It feels like if you're in your 40s or older, it's almost like your parents, like my parents did not have their pop culture necessarily grow up with them. The things that they had that stayed with them, like the Beatles or Dylan or different things, there were artists that changed and evolved with them, but their pop culture, their TV shows, their things kind of died as they got older, right? But ours have grown with us. So you could grow up on a cartoon like Transformers, now Transformers is everywhere. There's like, how many movies? Seven movies? I don't know. You can grow up on G.I. Joe and it gets reinterpreted over and over again. You can grow up on Spider-Man and superheroes and they're absolutely ubiquitous and huge, right? They're the kind of giant cultural milieu.
So it's almost like our pop culture from Godzilla to Gremlins to all of it, if you're of a certain age, gets reinterpreted and renewed in exciting ways But the last 10-15 years they've been in very PG-13 ways. It's almost like Avengers and the whole MCU (aside from a couple things like Deadpool which you see the hits come when they move outside this zone) have been sort of a broad appeal, but written almost for teenagers with enough adult appeal that you'd be excited to see them. And I love Avengers. I loved Endgame. I loved Infinity War. I love the whole MCU build. I mean, to me, it's one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history. But if you think of the tenor of it, it's designed to be for teenagers with appeal to adults. But if you see something like The Boys or you see something like Invincible or Godzilla Minus One and you see some of the movies coming out in a horror space too right now, what you're finding is almost like there's a kind of new shape to some of it, which is a very adult and serious take emotionally, psychologically, sometimes socio-politically, on things within a genre. And then there's also an elevation of the bonkers Balls-to-the-wall shit that you love about that thing at the same time. It's a barbell effect
So what I'm trying to say is like, example, Invincible, right? It's a great superhero show. We're the same company with Wytches with it. We're Amazon Animation. But it's got more emotionally substantive and dark and deep stuff than you'd expect. It's very adult. And it's got over-the-top, hyper-violent superhero stuff that you love that's fun and out there and also adult, right?
Godzilla Minus One has a really adult story, not to spoil anything. But it's about a guy who's really haunted by his experiences in World War II and has Godzilla almost as this extension of that. And it's, on the one hand, the story is extremely sophisticated and mature on a human level, more than anything I've ever seen in Godzilla by a million miles.
And similarly, Godzilla is fucking unbelievably badass and cool in a way I've never seen, on the fun side of it, and that sort of max out the appeal and crazy fun monster side of that genre. So his spikes shoot out and light up before he shoots his flame breath. His atomic breath is far more destructive than anything you've ever seen. It's a barbell.
It's like the thing that you love about the genre is on steroids. And then it's also taking itself much more seriously. And I think this new thing is something that's going to become a model for a lot of, a lot of shows and movies going forward. It's going to almost be its own thing. You saw it with something like Deadpool and that too coming on, which I loved, but it's that sense not just of R-rated irreverent stuff, but R-rated serious stuff too. R-rated stuff all around where your pop culture is being taken seriously, whether it's an interpretation of Godzilla or a brand new IP, brand new story that has both things. Wytches is going right for the zone. It's supposed to be something that's emotionally devastating and heartfelt and all of that stuff that you don't normally see in a televisual animated space. And it's supposed to be the goriest, bloodiest, fucking scariest thing you could possibly see. So it's got that barbell effect too. But anyway, I just wanted to point it out and see what you guys think of that because I feel like it is something new that's happening. Anyway, talk to you soon. Bye!
S
Newsletter #170: The Barbell Effect