Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Thursday, December 12th. So close to Christmas, our house is just a chaos of pre-holiday madness. Our 17 year-old Jack is in the fever of finishing applying to colleges, which is wild. Our 13 year-old is obsessed with what moves the Yankees are going to make now that they lost Juan Soto to the Mets. And our five-year-old Quinn is just making Christmas lists right and left and just had his song fest yesterday, which was basically so cute you could just sort of die from it.
Anyway, a couple quick things. As it's getting close to the end of the year, we're going to post some of our favorite books from this last year of comics, and what a year it's been. Honestly, it feels like so many companies just have amazing books coming out, huge hits. It feels like this is a year where comics just came roaring back. 2023 felt like a good year, but it was a bit quiet. And it feels like this year, it's almost like comics sort of shrugged off a lot of the other medium that were a part of it before. And not that those things are bad. Movies and investment and streaming, all that stuff, they can be really good. But it feels like this year all that stuff kind of fell away a bit and it was just about the comics and to see so many companies just killing it. Skybound/Image with the Energon Universe:
and Universal Monsters:
IDW with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
Marvel with the Ultimate Universe:
And us with the Absolute Universe at DC and just on and on.
And so many big hits also in the indie world from Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees:
Local Man:
And The Power Fantasy from buddy Kieran Gillen:
It's such a good year. It really feels like it's been a thrill just to be a small part of it. So very, very grateful to you guys.
But the point of this post is also to make a big announcement. For the last six months, a bunch of you have been asking over and over when we're going to open up our Black Jackett Club again. And we keep pushing it off, but we're going to open it now. So for those of you that are new to Our Best Jacket, this tier that you're on, the free subscription tier, I can't even wrap my mind around it, but we've got about 25,000 subscribers at this point. And then we have a paid tier at $7/month, where we have, again, more people than I ever expected to have. And that tier allows you to do our class, Comic Writing 101/102/103, all of it. It's just Comic Writing 101 as the main class. We've done about probably around 30 classes at this point over the last three and a half years since we started Our Best Jacket.
And doing the $7 a month gets you access to the entire archive and you can join in when we do our classes live:
We're going to do one more next week that's free. I was going to do it tonight. I'm really sorry. It was just too much pre-holiday craziness over here to get my shit together and do it. So next week, we'll decide tomorrow, I'll post about it on Friday, but either Wednesday or Thursday, and it will be about single issues, we’re really excited, standalone issues. We did one about shorts for anthologies, eight pagers, 10 pagers, that kind of thing. But this one really will look at one-shots, like one issue with a completely self-contained story that has three acts. Look at different structures because it's such a challenge. How do you do that? How do you create a full story in just 20 pages or 40 pages? Like, how do you fit an entire idea, an entire mythology, an entire arc, emotional arc, plot arc, all of it, into such a compressed space.
So we'll look at a couple comics that really take different approaches to it. It's something that I know a lot of you were asking for, especially because a one shot is often your first gig this was my first gig we'll include mine here the original human torch for the Timely Comics project at Marvel all the way back in 2010. It was my first gig with Scott Wegener of Atomic Robo and you can take a look.
But anyway, one shots were my very first chance to get into the industry. I think for most people they are. So again, if you're looking to break in, it'll be a great class. It's free. We're going to do one more of these free for end of the year. A Christmas gift to everybody.
Anyway, so if you're a paid subscriber, though, you have access to the classes going forward after this one. You have access to all of the archived. And you get to send in two comics once a year for me to sign. We send them to a big warehouse. I go to the warehouse. I sign them. We're just about to do that. So we're going to announce that right after the holiday. Everyone that's a paid subscriber will get a chance to send. You can do an annual membership ($75/year), save some money, or you can go month to month, cancel any time, do one month for seven dollars, binge all of our classes nonstop and then quit. although I wouldn't recommend it, but whatever you want to do, we're just happy to have you.
And then we have our Black Jackett Club. So the Black Jackett Club, we set it up because people kept asking if there any way to do one-on-one meetings if they had questions about breaking into the industry or about one of the classes or they wanted to talk about their work or they just had questions about comics or they wanted to talk comics And so we did it as these five minute meetings. What it does is if you pay extra, once to twice a week we have a block called Office Hours and you get to meet with me virtually for what we say is five minutes but we actually allot ~10 minutes per person. And you can sign up as many times as you want throughout the year, usually we do once a month per person. And what it turned into was I started allowing people to show me work. And it was just a joy, honestly. It's something I really miss. It became really hands-on teaching in that way.
So right now, the way it works is if you join the Black Jackett Club, you can show me some of your work. I'll be honest if I can't get to it that week. But generally, I do. I get to them pretty much, I mean, 90-plus percent of the time. If you send it to me a week early, I'll read it. I can read under 20 pages. It has to be under 20 pages. 10 is a lot easier. Comic, script, idea, whatever it is. We can brainstorm, and we can also just talk comics. So again, we're going to reopen it. And the reason that we haven't reopened it, to be honest, is because we were seeing if anyone dropped out over the last six months, but really nobody has. So we just felt like we had to open it anyway. But we're only going to open it for a very few slots. I really can't make enough time, I think, for everybody. And I want to make sure that I do a good job with the people that are in it. So get very ready. Make sure that you sign up right away. You can give it as a gift to someone if you want, but it essentially allows you to meet with me once a month and talk about your work and show me your work and that stuff. I have a couple people that just love meeting and talking about comics that are out or what I'm working on or what they're working on, but without showing it, all that stuff.
So it gives you essentially a way to connect with me on a one-on-one level at least once a month. And then what we also do is twice a year at New York and at San Diego, we throw you a big breakfast for free on us where everyone does a meetup. So it's been so fun. I love it. It's one of my favorite things of the year. We did it in this past New York and the past few San Diegos. And we try and take you someplace nice, like a rooftop restaurant or somewhere good and just treat you. None of these tiers are tiers where we're making some huge amount of money or anything like that. I would honestly argue that the value of the tiers is more for you guys than for us.
The other perk for the Black Jackett tier is that you get to send 10 books in for me to sign once a year. 10 books of any kind. We send them to a warehouse in Florida and then I go down there and sign them. And again, if you're a paid subscriber at $7/month, you get two books a year. We're about to do that, just about to announce it. So we're going to do it right in the new year, allow you guys to send some books down. And it's the same thing we send because it's a lot of books with 25,000 people. Not everybody does it, obviously, but a good fraction of people do. And then it takes me a day or two to sign all the books. So you get that. There's a CGC option. You can pay through CGC if you want them monetized in that way, too. I don't care about that stuff. It's fine with me.
So anyway, yes. So we're going to reopen the Black Jacket Club. We're going to do it next week. Great Christmas gift, annual subscription to the regular paid tier. Great Christmas gift to people. Either way, we're just happy to have you. So thank you so much for being a part of this. So again, next week will be a really big week with our class. What I'd like you to do is take a look at your favorite one shots. Tell me and Tyler if you have any and we'll include them in the class. It can be anything from indie comics, superhero comics. I'd love to use them. But again, it has to be sort of a self-contained story. 22 to 28 pages is best. I don't want to make people read 40 something pages at a time. But if you have one that's just stellar that's that long, we might include it, not look at the whole thing in class, but that stuff too. So we'll create a nice Dropbox that everybody has access to and it's free. Again, this class will be free. So get ready. Next week we'll have fun. We'll do a big class. We might have a guest the way we had the amazing Kelly Thompson last time. Very, very excited for ‘25. This has been like a real fun, happy place for me personally in really stressful times. So I can't wait to keep it going and I'm deeply grateful to all you guys for being a part. So thanks again!
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