Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Friday, January 31st. Forgive my voice or any coughing. I got all better at the end of last week and then I had to take a quick work trip and the traveling did me in. I'm old and apparently my body has like, no defenses whatsoever anymore. So I have a bit of a cold, which is running through our house. So again, apologies for the old man voice. But I wanted to make a post about a few things. First, some housekeeping. We have MegaCon coming up the weekend after this weekend, the weekend of the 6th. And I'm going to be there with a bunch of friends. I'm there with Greg Capullo, first and foremost. I haven't seen him in a while. We're doing a special VIP panel. It might already be sold out, but it's on its way to selling out now already. So please, please, if you have an interest in doing a special panel with me and Greg where you get to take pictures with us and get special signed lithographs that you can't get anywhere else and get to ask us questions, please go to the link here and sign up right away because I don't want you to miss out. We have a blast together and we'd love for you to be a part.
But yeah, so I'll be at MegaCon Saturday and Sunday. I get in pretty late Friday, so I won't really be there except at the hotel. But I'll be there Saturday and Sunday and Jock is there and Deniz Camp is there, Tom King, like, tons of friends are going to this one. So I'm really, really excited to be a part. And I hope you'll come say hi. And again, if you're a paid subscriber, not a free subscriber, but a paid subscriber or a member of the Black Jackett Club, at the beginning of every signing that I have, I leave 10 to 15 minutes open for paid subscribers to come up and skip the line or have a line of their own before the signing begins. So you can still sign up now, it's just $7/month for a regular pass and that gives you access to all of the classes that we've recorded over the last four to five years and everything coming up as well. So I hope you'll sign up!
And we have Absolute Batman #5 coming out on the 12th:
I'm so excited, just in time for Valentine's Day! It is full of red, although not love. A lot of blood. It is probably our most violent issue. And I just wanted to say thank you, honestly, I just got the sales when I was talking to DC for the latest issue and we're over 140,000 copies on #5. And I just can't wrap my head around that. I can't. I never expected us to sell even really a fraction of that by the time we were at issue #5. But all I can tell you is the fact that Wonder Woman and Superman and the Absolute line are both over 100,000 at this point and still selling out. And it's just, it means the world to all of us involved. And we're just going to keep pushing to try and write you and draw you the best books on the stands. We're so thrilled.
And so everything is going well, for those asking, with Wytches. We are in production now. We're about to do some voice records. So we're starting to get the actual episodes up and running. I can't wait to tell you more when I can. And in terms of comics, White Boat #3 will be out later in March:
And thank you for the kind response to You Won't Feel a Thing, the new horror book from me and Jock, also from DSTLRY (as is White Boat). We're going to be putting that out soon too.
So on the class front, we're going to do one. I was talking to Mark Waid recently about coming in and guest teaching with me. I'd love to have him on. He's been an incredible mentor and teacher to me, both as a writer and just as someone in the community. And he's got incredible stories, incredible lessons, so I'd like to bring him in.
But if this coming week, the next week doesn't work out, then what I'll do is I'll probably teach a course on telling a personal story next week and then have Mark on the following month. So we'll figure it out. But I'd really like to do a class next week if we can. So I'll let you know more on Monday. But either way, I'm really thrilled to jump back into it.
And lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about that idea of telling a personal story. I think sometimes when things are chaotic or you're feeling a sea change in the world, you're feeling different than you were before, whether you're feeling awful and disheartened or you're feeling shocked or shaken. Sometimes in other times throughout your life, if you're feeling dazed by something good that's happened to you, a child, marriage, anything. Sometimes it can be hard to find your footing and figure out if you're thinking about superheroes in particular, how to use them, how to write through them towards these things that are so sudden and feel so axis-tilting, right?
So right now I think, being completely blunt, the way that I feel the Absolute universe is working is to speak to some of those themes really strongly. We conceived of the idea of the Absolute universe back in 2022. So it wasn't really with sort of the current events in mind, but it was always this feeling that I think I see in my kids, that things are getting harder, that systems are more entrenched. They're harder to change, whether it has to do with algorithms and big tech or political division, political manipulation, all kinds of stuff. It just seems more funded, more intractable, more difficult to budge. Things feel more firmly, immovable, more in decline in ways. And so that was a really hard thing to wrap my head around. How do I write Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman in a moment when it doesn't feel like there's going to be a big change for them when it comes to more opportunity, suddenly, for jobs?
My oldest is 17. He's just getting into college right now. He just got into a couple of schools. He's going to be out in the world soon and he's super hopeful and rebellious and all those kinds of things. He believes he and his friends will change the world, and that's kind of the impetus for Absolute Batman. But that said, I look at the world like Alfred in that series and see a really difficult environment. And so how do I write superheroes, which are designed in a lot of ways for instant gratification, with that in mind?
I was talking to the other Absolute writers this week. We have a weekly meeting on Zoom. Kelly Thompson and Jason Aaron and Jeff Lemire and Al Ewing and Deniz Camp and everybody involved. And we were just talking about what does it mean for our universe to be a place where we can express these things? And so what we realized was if it's infused with Darkseid energy, Darkseid isn't sentient in our universe right now. He's not like, a being sleeping in the stars, looking down and manipulating things. He's not telling the villains what to do. There's no mind control. But what does it mean if you're in a universe where every atom, every particle down to the microscopic and subatomic level to every kind of giant, grand machination of the universe when it comes to gravity or dark matter, is all kind of infused with the same Omega energy. And what we decided was it almost means like the universe leans towards hardship, leans towards indifference, leans towards cruelty, the crushing of good in some ways.
And so when we came to this realization, it felt really exciting because it felt like a new way of approaching superheroes for us. For me, writing in the main universe, you write these characters so they overcome evil. They overcome the villains. It's an immediate gratification. They're stories that give you the happy ending. One of the few times I did a story that ended darkly, because it was setting up Metal, was Justice League and the backlash for that was pretty immediate. People want to see the heroes win in the main universe. And it's not just about winning. It's seeing the results of their actions even more than winning. Having it set the world right. It's about social stability. It's about returning to some kind of confirmation of progress and community. But the Absolute universe, what's exciting about it is the heroes not only might not win, but that might be the point. Not that they're going to lose and die and it's going to be tragic and sad, but that they have a tremendous faith that their actions are going to have an impact at some point, but maybe not in their lifetime. Maybe in their lifetime, they'll win some small battles and then lose and the arc of history will curve darkly. But eventually, maybe someone will, at a better time, hear about the things they did and take those things and be able to effect real change.
And it became so exciting because it was like, oh, that's who Absolute Batman is. That's this Bruce. He actually, in the first couple arcs, has a bit of a death wish that his friends have to assuage of him because that's the way he sees his father. His father put himself in front of a bullet and Bruce and his friends and that was his form of heroism. He went down to save people. And so Bruce thinks that's where he's headed as well. He expects Batman to go down at the end of the first arc. And the harder part is accepting the fact that if you don't and you survive and you start to fight to survive and you don't just sort of look to flame out and go down as a kind of blaze of glory, what does that mean if you fight and fight and fight and you still don't see your actions create the results that you hope for? That to me suddenly wasn't depressing thought at all, talking to all these people who are such good writers and artists in the room, it was actually really inspiring. It made me feel like that's how I feel like writing superheroes right now.
It's exciting to me to have a hero who says, “I understand I might just win this battle and lose the war, but down the line in the bigger war the point is to always resist and fight. The point is to always stick up for what you believe in even if you know that you don't expect to win. You expect to win by virtue of your action setting an example and reverberating through history in some way. So that at a better time, maybe they'll have an impact, a bigger impact than they do now. They have an immediate impact.” It's not like Batman goes out and doesn't save people. He affects tremendous change in Gotham in the immediate. But I think he also knows that the forces he's up against are going to push back even harder. And so that was really exciting to me.
I just wanted to bring it up because it was so thrilling sitting there with these people who I really admire and respect and are inspired by and coming up with a thesis about our universe and realizing we were all writing to that. In fact, Kelly read a speech that Circe has about Diana at one point and about the Amazons and how they thought about Diana. And it's the same thing. It was like creating her for a better time, even if they can't win and she can't win right now. She's a weapon or an arrow they're almost hurling it at the monsters in this moment. And similarly, Superman, he's on a doomed path at the beginning but he still believes in the good of everybody. And there's something so potent about that.
Again, it's not an exact political allegory. It's not a one-to-one in some way with the way I feel about politics. Superheroes never fit that exactly. But the spirit of it feels really important to me right now. The spirit of writing stories with these characters about patience and about resistance and about pushing back on things that seem immovable and huge and knowing again that maybe you won't affect them the way that you hope, but that you have faith that whatever you're doing will have an impact eventually, even if you don't get to see that impact in some way. And so that was it was really exciting. And it kind of crystallized things for me. And I can't say enough good things about Martian Manhunter and Flash and Green Lantern.
I've read these books now through issues two to three and they're fantastic. And they're really different, each one really offers a special flavor. So I can't wait for you to check them out in March and April. And we have some amazing announcements coming about the main line. I'm signed up again to consult with DC for another year. We're finishing that now. I'll be writing or working on the meta story with Joshua Williamson, my co-architect on the All In uber narrative. And so we're going to bring that to a head in the fall and then tell our halfway point with the story around then and then push it forward even further into ‘26 in a really big way. So we have a really big plan that we'll be telling you more about soon, but we're just super excited. It was a great week of talking to creators and really crystallizing both what we feel the different worlds stand for at this moment and also where they're headed and why those things are important about comics, that they're saying important things about comics and what we believe we stand for, and the world itself.
Ultimately, if you want the skeleton key to what we're doing with All In, Darkseid is sort of like the ultimate troll, right? Darkseid is the one saying “comics should be done. Superheroes are finished. Superheroes are oversaturated. We've seen all the biggest stories. We're sick of them. They're culturally irrelevant.” He's that. He's the one that says “time for the doll to die.” And he's transformed himself into this huge thing that speaks that. And with All In, we said, “well, look, we want to show you that we can not only defy that premonition, but surprise you in all kinds of ways that breathe new life into these characters, both by reinventing them in the Absolute line and telling epic stories in the main line.” And now comes the second part of that story in ‘25. So, very, very excited.
Anyway, over the weekend or Monday, we'll announce what we're doing for teaching next week. I'll remind you about MegaCon. If you're going, again, please get the subscription if you want to guarantee you'll see me. I haven't been to MegaCon in a bit. The lines there are big. So the seven bucks will save you a lot. And I'm excited to see you. I hope everything's great, bye!
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