Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Thursday, January 4th, although you will hear this on Friday, January 5th, because it's late and I am driving back from a fantastic dinner with brother James Tynion IV. His birthday was last week or so, and my birthday is in a week and a half. And so we have kind of a tradition now and then of trying to get together and have dinner, the two of us, and catch up.
It was fantastic. He's got so many great plans for Spectrograph at DSTLRY and all his great books for W0rldtr33, and Something is Killing the Children, the whole franchise, and he's building an amazing creative empire and I'm so proud of him, and he's such a great friend. And if you're not following his Substack, go do that, but I'm sure you already are.
And also, first thing, I just wanted to apologize for taking such a long break. The reason that we began and we missed our class right before Christmas and all of that stuff was that Tyler, the greatest assistant, got sick. He's OK with me saying that, he posted a picture of himself in the hospital, but he had a reaction to a viral infection and wounded up having to be hospitalized for a while. He’s better now, but it took us off the board for a little while right before Christmas and it was just too hard to get things up and running in the mayhem of days right before Christmas itself. And then my family and I went down to Disney World for the interim between after Christmas and for New Year's, which was a trip as crowded as I've ever seen it in my life. So it was that blend of fantastic and also completely hellish. And there was a lot of whiplash parenting because we have Quinn who's four and can't quite distinguish reality from fantasy yet, so when a five foot six chipmunk is bearing down on him he thinks this is completely real and he's both horrified and and excited at the same time, and then I have Jack who's 16 who just wants to go on coasters, and Emmett who's 12 who's trying to finally get over his fear of thrill rides. So a lot of different core dad memories but it was a lot of fun and it's always nice to go down there.
I have especially fond memories because as I've told you, I think, I worked there after college when I was trying to get out of my sort of comfort zone and have experiences because I wanted to be a writer and a comic book artist and all these things. And so I was a custodian, like a janitor, and I was a character. I was Buzz Lightyear and Pluto and Eeyore. And out of those, my favorite was Buzz Lightyear because his costume was foam and it was the lightest. And it was stiff, so a lot of the people that were characters wanted to be actors and dancers and such, and so Buzz was not a favorite costume of theirs because he's quite rigid, whereas the fur costumes you can move around and jump. But the fur costumes are insanely fucking hot and you go into them with six pairs of shorts and six pairs of t-shirts at the beginning of the day because every shift you change out of one and into another and you drink endless Powerade, at least you did back then. And you never pee. And I was in the best shape of my life. I was fucking ripped after being Eeyore and so on. Buzz was a very nice thing. Plus, he has a stamp so you don't have to write everybody's name in their books. But thank you guys for being so patient with us.
A couple bits of housekeeping. One, we're going to reschedule our class “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to be “The Nightmare After Christmas.” We'll try and do it next week, I think, or schedule it next week for the following week. Maybe I'll do it on my birthday. It’ll be fun. Also, I signed everybody's books in the Black Jackett Club in Florida. All however many hundred books, it was a thousand books, whatever it was. Very, very excited for you to get those back. They should be coming back really soon. And as soon as those are done, what we're going to do is give everybody in the paid tier of Best Jacket, the $7 a month tier that gets you all the classes and gets you to skip lines at cons and all that stuff, a chance to send two books of your choice to the same location in Florida and I will go down again and sign those. So that's coming very soon. If you don't have a paid subscription and you feel like paying seven bucks just to get that part of it, pay for a couple of months, drop it after if you want, but you'll get your book signed.
The other thing is I'm going to be doing Megacon. I'm excited. They invited me down and it turns out that I didn't think I was free that weekend, but I'm free and I have a couple of friends going and a couple of things I want to do in Florida. So I'm going to be going down there for the first time in quite a long time. I don't think I've been there in five or six years. So if you're going to MegaCon, I will be there Saturday and Sunday. I'm flying in Saturday morning and flying back Sunday afternoon. So no Thursday or Friday. But there's a whole host of great people there. Jason Aaron and Geoff Johns and many, many great creators. So I hope you'll swing by. It's a fantastic show.
Also, thank you guys so much again for the response to Canary. I'm really proud of these books. I just wanted to say again, like, thank you for supporting me the last couple years. For me, I think I said it here once before, but just to reiterate, it's been like, this incredible creative journey getting to sort of step aside from superhero comics and the main spotlight for a while and really flex muscles creatively and just after a decade of being on a very narrow track, which I loved, and I love that narrow superhero track, but getting to sort of go in all different kinds of tributaries creatively, work with artists I'd never worked with like Dan Panosian and Jamal Igle and Valeria Favoccia. And then, similarly, try projects that I'd never tried before, like working with my son (By a Thread). Doing an all-ages book with Jamal (Dudley Datson). Doing something that's speculative science fiction with Francis Manapul (Clear). Doing something that's historical fiction with Tula Lotay (Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder). And the response to all those books and the support that you've shown the way that they've wound up on best of lists and sold and all of that just means the world. Thank you. Just thank you.
I know it's been a quieter couple of years where I've been able to just make books that I love in a way without some of the pressures of sort of sales and needing a book to hit a hundred thousand every month and so on, it's meant a lot to me And now this year I think as a kind of primer for 2024 I'm ready to kind of come back to the things that are more of a comfort zone for me. I've spent a couple years trying to get out of my comfort zone and expanding creatively and trying things I've always wanted to try and now I feel ready to kind of come back to that zone of horror, of ongoing series, of superheroes and really try and do some special work with some great creators. So I'm really excited about it.
The first thing out of the gate is going to be White Boat, which is a series like Night of the Ghoul with fantastic friend and co-creator Francesco Francavilla. It's coming out from DSTLRY alongside or right in the same sort of batch of books with brother James Tynion's book Spectrograph and also the great Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's book too, Blood Brothers Mother. And also the fantastic Christian Ward is doing art on Spectrograph. He's a good friend and an amazing writer and artist doing Batman: City of Madness right now. You should completely check it out if you're not. But White Boat is a sort of pure horror book with Lovecraftian dread about a guy who winds up going on to write an article about the biggest yacht in the world and suddenly it takes off for somewhere he doesn't expect and it becomes a really terrifying journey. I love the book and I love working with Francesco, so I hope you'll check it out. That's out in spring.
And after that, it really is like you'll see some announcements about what we're doing. I'll have some projects announced, and I'm excited about them all. And this will be a great place for news on everything. So right now, it's a little bit quiet. And then come March, April, May, it's going to get really, really noisy and I'll give you sneak peeks and real windows into the process of creating the things that we're going to announce soon and I think you'll enjoy it.
Also, on the other kind of track, outside of comics, for those of you sort of new to this, we keep getting new subscribers right around the holidays, so we really appreciate it. But for those of you who haven't been in this zone or are unaware, I've been co-showrunning with the great Marion Dayre, who just worked on Marvel's Echo and worked on Better Call Saul, an adaptation of Wytches, our horror comic book from me and Jock from 2015, for adult animation. It's the same group of people that do Invincible over at Amazon. It's very R-rated, very gory, very emotional, very mature. I'm really excited about it and we're sort of at the back half now of the season. We've got eight episodes, we're sort of contracted to do a season two also, so we're really lucky. But we're breaking episode seven of eight and we have about four scripts in and approved so we're definitely kind of in the last month plus of intense work before we actually get to kind of sit with the scripts and just polish them. But I love the show, I can't wait for you guys to see it. It'll probably be on the end of this year, beginning of next year or mid next year. I'm not sure exactly yet. It depends on animation production schedule, but we're going to be getting character designs and test animation and anything I can share with you, I will share with you. But you'll start to see a drumbeat for the release of that show definitely in 2024. So we'll share a lot of good pieces here.
So those are a couple things we have planned for the site in 2024. I can't open the Black Jackett Club yet. We got a lot of requests to do that. That's our top tier. It's a few hundred dollars a year and it allows you to meet with me in office hours and to show me your work. It's something that I have no business doing with the amount of work I have on my plate, but I won't give it up no matter what because I really love it. I've met some incredible aspiring writers and seen some fantastic work and watched them develop and grow and a few break into the industry in their own way. So it's a blast, but I just can't manage having any more people in there, so I'm sorry. But I promise, as soon as things slow down, probably in the spring, we'll open it again for a small number of people, so keep an eye out for that.
But yeah, our plans for Best Jackett this year really are, instead of doing so many different creative projects where you get to really expand and challenge myself in different ways, to focus in on a few big projects and just move back towards that center of horror, superheroes, that kind of stuff. So lots to announce, lots to have fun with here. And again, I just can't thank you enough for all the support. It's been a fantastic ride getting to do this and 2023 was just a fantastic year. I feel like I got to make all the books I'd ever hoped to make in all different ways, and now I'm kind of ready to zero in and make a couple series that sort of exist back in that familiar home territory of horror, action, superheroes, those things, and surprise you hopefully with a couple really special projects. So anyway, thank you guys again, and yeah, we'll talk soon!
S
P.S. Sometimes soon I'm going to do a post about all the different genres of Disney shirts you become accustomed to when you work at the parks, but they're varied and many and wonderful. But there's like, typically, the used for identification shirt, which is like, a group of people all wearing the same exact Disney shirt. Usually one that says like “mom, dad, daughter,” or it's like “birthday squad,” or one person in the thing will have something funny that's like the dad will have a shirt that says, “I don't do matching Disney shirts,” but it matches everybody else's. Then there's like, the dad joke genre, which is always about like how expensive it is. It'll be like “most expensive day ever” instead of “best day ever.” Or, you know, “broke” with like, a Mickey symbol in the O.
Then there's like, beyond the dad joke one there's just the fucking really cool ones which the best ones I saw this year were “Walt” but it's Walter White and the Michael Scott “I declare bankruptcy” in a Mickey hat were my favorites, but there's definitely a longer post to be had someday if you guys are interested!
Newsletter #171: New Year, Old Priorities