Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Friday, January 26th. I cannot believe January is almost over. I know I say it every month, but it just feels like everything is flying by. And before we start, a tiny bit of housekeeping. I am going to be at Megacon next weekend, the weekend of the 3rd.
I will only be there Saturday and Sunday. I'm flying in really early Saturday and flying back Sunday night. But I haven't done a con in a while, I haven't done that con in a while. And I love the convention, I love the city, I love the people going. The organizers are fantastic. So please, please come by and say hi. And again, if you're a paid Best Jackett subscriber, we'll have a little bit of time at the beginning of each signing session where you guys can come up ahead of the main line and get your stuff signed. So we'll have sort of a separate queue before the signing starts for people that are in our Best Jackett paid tier. Or of course, if you're in the Black Jackett Club, which is the highest paid tier, it applies to you as well. Again, come by, it’s my chance to say thank you for the support. I love meeting you guys, really excited to see you.
And another bit of housekeeping, we’re going to do our class, the Nightmare AFTER Christmas, all about horror in comics. Next week, Thursday night, 9:30pm EST. It’ll be live, we’re going to be looking at all the material we listed last time from James Tynion IV and Joshua Hixson’s The Deviant to other horror, student horror, everything. Tyler's going to make a packet (at the bottom of this post for paid subs).
And the thing I want you to think about is what elements of horror work better in comics and which elements are weaker and you want to stay away from. Essentially what I want to do is teach a class about all the kind of benefits and all the strengths and all the advantages you have writing horror for comic books. It's different than writing prose, it's different than doing movies, all of it. You have really particular tools at your disposal that you can use to great, great effect. And again, I think the biggest thing we have, and I'll just lay this out there now, but there'll be a lot more topics in this vein when we look at the work in the class itself, is imagination. So the scariest experience I think I ever had as a kid with a text of any kind, movie, book, anything, was when I started to read Pet Sematary when I was too young for it.
I was like, nine or ten, and I was so upset by it that I had to put it down and put it away, and I actually like, hid the book because it bothered me so much. And I was a kid, but the reason is, looking back, because my imagination filled in the scariest possible versions of Zelda, the sister with the twisted back, Gage coming back after being buried, all of it. Your imagination supplies the absolute worst nightmare you could possibly conjure for anything that you read without any visual representation. So comics has that effect. It’s an active experience. Movies are passive. You sit there and you're immersed, and it's experiential, and it's wonderful. But books and comics, the reader actually gets to decide when to turn the page, how engaged they are, and you can use that to your advantage by playing on the imagination, by prolonging the scare, by creating an immersive sense of dread, by doing more enveloping character work in a slower way. There are all kinds of things that you can do, and we'll go over all of that. So I'm really excited—the Nightmare After Christmas (and after New Year’s), next week, Thursday 9:30 p.m. EST. Be there, and again if you're not signed up for the paid tier you can always sign up it's only $7 you do it now you can join the class and then you can see all of our other classes, all 20+, archived, look at them all, cancel your subscription a month later if you want, although no one seems to. I'm very proud and happy about that.
Okay, housekeeping over. I just wanted to say today's also, speaking of over, the very last day of our in-person (or Zoom) writers' room for Wytches Season One. I can't believe it. It's literally been every day, for five days a week, the last four plus months, from 9am until 3pm PST, so 12 to 6pm or so EST, building this Season One of Wytches. And I cannot tell you how proud I am of the material, how badly I want you guys to be able to see what we're doing. So we go into animation. It's called VizDev, visual development. We start next week. I can't believe it. We're gonna start to see designs, we're gonna get test animation, animatics, all kinds of stuff. Anything I can share, I will. So this is the place to be, especially if you sign up for the paid tier. I'm gonna try and give you extra windows into it.
But now, after all this time, we built this season one, and I'm so proud of it. It's the same story as which is the book. But I wrote that book when I was really afraid of being a dad, when we had little kids. That's really what that book is about. It's a fear of parenthood. But now I have teenagers. I still have little kids, I’ve got Quinny, but I have a much more multifaceted, multidimensional set of fears and anxieties about parenting. But also I see it from my kids' point of view differently. So this story is the same story in many ways about the fears of parenting, but it's also about growing up and realizing your parents aren't who you thought they were and giving more agency to the kids as well. So it's almost just a bigger more multi-dimensional version of the series and there's also way more fucking wytches and horror and gore and mythology than before, it is way expanded.
And just as an aside I'd love to hear what you think but my personal belief is that if you're gonna do horror and animation you lean the way anime did, even going all the way back to Akira where you see things that in live-action would almost be too upsetting. So you can do body horror and a kind of gore and really unsettling, terrifying scares that in live-action with actors and visual effects of any kind would make you throw up, would be too disturbing. So the series earns it, it's all about how wytches are dark reflections of us and so the body, the human body, is a big part of it and it's distortions and monstrousness and the violence that we commit emotionally is reflected in the violence that's committed physically in the in the series, so it is out there. I mean it is a hard-R series, but again I couldn't be prouder of it. I don't know work that I've been prouder of that I've gotten to be a part of and I owe it all to the people in the room you should follow them all. Ty, the best assistant, is going to put their social media here, they’re fantastic writers:
Bornila Chatterjee
Eric Binswanger
Harrison Rivers
Jeff Howard
Marion Dayre
And we now have a few months off before we do season two. Season two is greenlit as well, so we’ll be diving back into the room in Spring and then I have this project after that I can’t talk about yet that is also animated with the same people and I can’t wait to tell you about that. I think it’s going to blow your minds. So I’m going to be making a lot of cartoons over the next few years. But the next few months are both about visual development, VizDev, for Wytches. But in addition to that, it's also about comics. I'm coming back to really finish up White Boat, which I can't wait for you guys to see. It's coming out from DSTLRY.
And there's even a musical component. I'm working with one of my good friends, the musician from Hooray for Earth, Noel Heroux, and he's doing a score to go along with the book so you can listen. And it's amazing, It's all kinds of deep sea material. And there'll be an album, a record that you can get with a special edition of the book once it comes out in print as a collection. But the first issue comes out in March alongside James Tynion IV and Christian Ward’s amazing Spectragraph for DSTLRY. I’m very, very grateful to them, fantastic company, go pick up Somna and Gone, everything they have out right now. And yeah, it’s just a chance to take a breath, which you know, if you know me, I’m not very good at.
And also it’s a chance to dive back into superhero comics a bit. Without giving too much away, I've got a project I'm very excited about, really, really nervous about, but have a lot of faith in. And just to be clear, like, for me, right now, I have so much work in the animated space (in a good way). I don't mean that as a humble brag or a brag-brag. I just have a lot of work in animation. And I love animation, I really do. I didn't know how much I would love it. But it's like comics, it's super collaborative. And you get to bring in your co-creators, so, Jock is involved in Wytches in every way. He actually is the art director. And you're making it with people that have different ambitions in a lot of ways than live-action people. I don't know, it's just less Hollywood, not to knock live-action stuff, but they're just fucking wonderful creative nerds and great storytellers. I love it. And so I'm happy to be in the zone and I love the people that make the stuff as well. The actual material production is fun and it's elastic and you get to do things you couldn't do in live-action and all of it is just wild. And I also believe it's a lane that is expanding. Blue Eye Samurai, go watch that. Invincible, etc.
I just think that after years and years and years of really good Marvel movies and a lot of PG-13 fare dominating the cultural landscape, things that spanned both kids and adults in a way that was sort of the biggest tent possible, people are now veering towards adult stuff again. Like, adults want adult shit. I think that's why you're seeing such a huge swell behind R-rated shows. Especially in animation, but also in live action. Things that are unabashedly adult. And I believe that animation has a whole lane that it's just starting to open in that zone that isn't super high genre, either. It doesn't have to be anime, as much as I love anime, or even anime-inspired. I think it can be straight-ahead. You can do animated stuff that’s going to be straight-up R-rated that’s horror, that’s sci-fi, that’s all that stuff. So I think you have an audience primed for it that was raised on anime and Pixar and really sophisticated stuff and now wants stuff that isn’t necessarily for their kids and them, it’s for them, and maybe the kids sneak in and watch it, like I did when I was a kid.
Anyway, the point is, I love animation, I'm having a blast, and I don't have a need to go back to licensed work, to superhero work. The only reason I would do it is if I thought there was an opportunity to do something really special story-wise, creatively, collaboratively with creators that I really love, and that would help stores, that would big, fun series or book or story or collaboration that would also be something that people would want to go in and buy because I think we need a heavy hand in the direct market. Alright you guys, have a good one. Thanks for listening, and yeah, next week, CLASS!
S
P.S. My amazing students Jerry and Veronica have been supervising an exciting project spinning off from the big success of Tales from the Cloakroom Vol. 1 and 2. I’m happy to announce that they’re working with fellow Best Jackett members to publish The Cloakroom, an ongoing anthology series. The waiting page for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign just went up, so make sure to hit that link and click the Save button so you’ll get alerted when it goes live!
Also, friend of the newsletter
just announced the follow-up to his great novel Secret Identity that’s called Alter Ego! Popverse posted an article with more details, but the short of it is that it’s now available to pre-order. Go support a deserving creator!
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