Hey guys, it’s Scott.
It is Wednesday, January 14th and I’m in a very weird headspace. Forgive me, I haven’t been around very much. I was even going to post that I’m sorry to all the people I haven’t gotten back to in the last couple weeks, but we’re actually taking our oldest son Jack to college this evening. He starts halfway through, he took a gap semester. He’s going to school up in Boston, so the car is packed to do some work today and then when Jeannie gets home from work we’re going to drive him up. So I’m really trying hard to wrap my head around how this is real life but here we are. So, so proud of him. So excited, nervous, everything. It’ll be hard without him here, but I’m really, really thrilled.
Anyway, work! First, we have D.C. KO #3 out today.
This is our big tag team match. It’s me and Javi Fernández and Joshua Williamson and Xermanico and Alejandro Sánchez on colors and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou on lettering. It’s just so much fun to make this book. I really, really am overwhelmed with gratitude that you guys are checking it out in such big numbers. I’m so happy that it seems like you guys are liking what Josh and I are doing story-wise. And again, just a huge thank you. We really, really appreciate it.
Also, we have the FOCs coming up soon for Final Order Cut-Off for Absolute Batman #17.
This is the start of a two-part story with really huge reveals. We even redacted the covers so that we didn’t give away spoilers. This two-parter is me and Eric Canete and Frank Martin on colors, who does all of the issues with Nick. It introduces Absolute Poison Ivy in all her glory. And again, it’s a really key piece of Bruce’s story. It changes things a lot for the arc after it, which starts at #19 and features Scarecrow. The cover for that’s coming really soon. That arc that runs from #19 to 25 is going to completely transform our series. We’re really, really excited about it. We’ve been building to the material in it. I’m trying really hard not to spoil anything because people have been telling me they really, they want me to try and curb spoiling stuff. So I’m doing my best, but it makes it so boring when I’m telling you what’s coming because there’s just no meat on the bone. But even so, I swear to you, you will see by the end of issue #19 how big we are going with this. Not even by the end, by halfway through something massive happens that changes the trajectory of the series. And by the end, something really huge happens that I think will get you guys super excited.
So these next three months on Absolute Batman just get really, really more and more, I think, intense. And not just in kind of an over-the-top, brutal action way. I mean, emotionally intense, where Bruce’s world really gets turned upside down and he really has to define himself as Batman in all kinds of new ways, so I’m really excited for you to see. It features all the characters that you love. It has all the friends. It has Harley. It has Deathstroke coming in in a big way. All kinds of stuff. Barbara Gordon plays a big role. So check it out. And more villains that you don’t expect hidden in the wings. So Monday’s Final Order Cut-Off also for the Work-in-Progress edition, they’re these big, beautiful, oversized black and white editions, of Dark Nights Metal. So I hope you order that. I love what they do with these editions and I’d love to keep them going.
Moving on. So I wanted to talk for a moment about the last post I did because I did an expected to get as much traction as it did, but it kind of made the rounds right before New Year’s.
And I wanted to just kind of clarify a couple things because people were asking, I got a lot of questions from people about how you meet the market. The post I did was kind of about the state of affairs, like the way I see the comic market right now and how competitive it is, but the bright spots, the danger zones and just learning as a creator to try and gauge the market when you’re about to put out a book. And I just wanted to make it really clear because the questions I got were like, “well, how do you meet the market in terms of chasing these trends?” And that’s absolutely not what I was saying. You should never try and chase trends. By the time you get there, they’re over. But what is really important and what I was trying to say is that as a creator, I think it’s crucial to understand the market that you’re about to jump into. So it doesn’t mean changing your book. It doesn’t mean trying to adjust your whole plan in a way that makes you feel queasy about your own creative integrity. It doesn’t mean changing what you were doing to try and make a quick buck. What it’s about for me is really making sure you’re aligned.
And what I mean by that is that I had a lot of friends or some friends I feel like that were disappointed in the way that their creator-owned books did in the last couple of years because they had expected them to do more like they had done in 2016, 2017, even in 2020. And so what I was trying to argue or at least suggest was trying to take measures to avoid that misalignment. It’s that misalignment of expectation and reality that can be really devastating. And I’ve been there, believe me, so I know. But in this position right now at DC, as a consultant and having a different job than I used to, I have kind of two jobs, right? So I have my DC corporate job and then I have my writing job. I have access to more sales data than I had before. I’m in contact with a lot more retailers and distributors and stuff than I used to be. And so I just have a wider funnel of information coming in about what things are selling and what things are not. And again, it’s not to try and meet those trends or try and chase things, but it is to be aware of the things that are underperforming or overperforming. just so you can brace yourself or be realistic about how something is going to do.
So anyway, it kind of goes back to this lesson that we did in our class, Comic Writing 101. And we will be doing a class really soon. It’s just been a chaos tornado here with getting ready to take Jack up to college and a birthday, all this kind of stuff. It’s been nuts. So we will do a class with Joshua Williamson next week. I’ll post more about it really soon. I think it’ll be really fun. But I did a class a while ago about triangulation.
So it’s kind of a corny term, but James Tynion IV and I used it just privately with each other. It’s just the best word we came up with for ourselves. But it came from this saying that comic folks that we worked for had, this old kind of motto, that you had to be two of three things together to survive in comics. You had to be good, fast, or nice. So you were one of those things, you wasn’t enough. If you were two of those things, you could make it through. And I have my argument with those things. I don’t think you can be nice and fast but not good. Either way, that was the saying. But we always thought of it as you need a fourth thing, or there’s a fourth of leg of the stool. And that was this thing called triangulation. For me, triangulation is an awareness of of the market. It’s an awareness of the context in which you’re producing this book. And it means a lot of different things. It means looking at, if you’re on a licensed character like Batman, how Batman is perceived at that moment, what stories are being told about him, how fans feel about him. how fans feel about you as a writer or as a creator at that moment, what retailers feel about you, how your sales are. It’s knowing all of this stuff so that you don’t change the story you’re telling, but that you go in with open eyes. And if there are small things you can do to help adjust and give your book the best chance possible, you can do those.
So for example, triangulation on that level is like, if I’m coming in and I’m doing a story on Batman that I know is going to upset people, like when we did the Jim Gordon becoming Batman story, then I understand that they’re going to reject it, but I love it. I’m going to do it anyway. Because again, I’m not changing it to meet the market. But what I am going to do is acknowledge at the beginning of the story in some way that I see that it is stupid as an idea. It’s ridiculous, but let’s have fun. Give it a chance. And so You know, I had a little opening scene where Jim is doing an interview and he says something about how he’s going to be Batman, how he’s proud. And then when the camera’s off, he’s like, and this is the dumbest idea in the history of Gotham City. Where’s my damn Batmobile?
And so the acknowledgement is just like, I see your concerns. I know how you feel. We’re going to do it anyway and give it a chance. And some people give it a chance, some people don’t. But that’s the tiniest version of triangulation. It just means being aware of the environment your story’s coming out in. And if you care to, trying to give it the best chance of succeeding possible. There’s all kinds of levers you can pull in other ways. There’s the variant cover market. There’s going out and meeting the retailers that you think will like the book that you’re doing and particularly sell the kind of thing that you’re doing, whether it’s horror, whether it’s political, whether it’s just big bombastic space opera. It’s you going to those stores and talking to those people and being like, “can I do a signing here?” There’s obviously the online community stuff. There’s the right outlets to go to talk to, the ones that have the biggest reach or ones that don’t have any reach, but that are really passionate about the kind of thing you’re doing. All of that is business sense and your interaction with the company you work for, the way that you present yourself, like all this stuff.
My biggest advice about it other than being as open to information as you can be, is to be as sincere as possible. If you were doing a book that is small, is a niche book, that’s great. Do it and say, “this book is really personal to me and I hope more people will pick it up than I expect, but this is the market for this book and I’m going right for that market. I’m going for those people.” If I do a book that’s part prose, then I’m going to bookstores, you know, and I’m not expecting it or trying to make it sell like Batman. I’m not trying to do five variant covers for it. I’m trying to just give it to the people that I hope will love it. I offset the cost of that book by going to extra conventions or by doing something else.
And so, again, it’s never about changing the core thing that you’re doing, but it’s about sincerity with both the approach to your book creatively and also sincerity about approaching the market and being like the market six years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago was wildly different. And I know I’ve said this before, but I think it’s just crucial. There were so many different elements in comics, even six years ago that were creating avenues for all kinds of books that really are not there anymore. There was so much investment from streaming in small companies. There was the hope that things would get optioned and that intellectual property IP or content would get picked up. There was all of this COVID money after 2020 where people were monetizing their kid hobbies again. You saw it with Pokémon, you saw it with baseball cards, you see it with comics. So there was a whole thing about first appearances of new characters would generate 50,000 sales. So you could figure out a way to do that and still at the same time do a series that was what you wanted it to be. There was venture capital money. So there were companies coming in making comics in all kinds of new ways online and newsletters.
And none of this stuff is stuff I’m saying is bad. But what I’m saying is there were all these different ways of producing different kinds of books. And having the market be more varied and responsive so that you had different levers to pull to get a book to survive in different ways. And a lot of those levers are gone now, or at least much smaller. And what you just have is a really competitive, direct market. So that’s what I was saying, is that if you’re doing a book that doesn’t have something that feels like it’s urgent, it doesn’t feel like this audience, which is a great audience right now, is going to be excited by it. And again, what I think they’re responding most passionately to are things that feel a little risky, things that feel a little daring, things that feel a little theirs. That can be recombining elements that are familiar, like you’re doing over in the Energon Universe. It can be big swings and completely new takes on mythologies the way Ultimate X-Men is. It can be bringing in exciting and unconventional kinds of art for traditional characters and the way that Transformers was doing. It can also be doing things like we’re doing at the Absolute Universe, where we’re burning the characters down and building them up in new ways and trying to use artists and writers that have really different takes than you’re used to.
But my point is that these things are overperforming in the market right now. Things that make people feel like comics is doing things that they haven’t seen before and things that are beginnings that feel like theirs, this kind of alpha energy to it that’s beginning. Again, if what you’re doing is not that in some way, it doesn’t mean that it can’t take off and sell huge and be a surprise hit. It doesn’t mean that you should change what you’re doing. It just means adjusting to look at the market and see there are still places where these books that aren’t in that zone can do well, but they’re just less avenues than there were six or seven years ago. So that’s all I was trying to say. There are ways of taking a book that is a longer form story, a slow burn that doesn’t have some of the elements of traditional monthly comic book storytelling. Maybe it doesn’t have big cliffhangers because there’s a reason you chose not to. Maybe it doesn’t have big action or this or that and that’s fine. But it’s trying to find sincerely and honestly how that book fits in and then meeting the people that can help your book do well in that and being realistic about those expectations. That’s what I meant.
So I hope that’s really helpful. I posted something about the way we’re going to try and handle spoilers on Absolute Batman.
And that’s a triangulation. That’s us trying to figure out with retailers, and there’s a lot of different ideas right now. So we’re still figuring it out. But I posted something about how we’re going to try and redact more covers going up. And we are going to redact some, but we also understand from retailers the need to make sure that things are put out way in advance so retailers can get ready and sell them without being surprised at the last minute. So it’s a dance, but that is a triangulation. It’s trying to listen to fans who are against spoilers. We don’t want spoilers and retailers who say spoilers sell books and figuring out a way that we feel comfortable with it, honestly, where we feel like we’re doing the best story, we’re not changing anything for market demand. But at the same time, we’re trying to make it the most fun and the most exciting for people and the most sellable.
Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a business sense if you’re trying to do it in a way that’s about being honest about the book you’re doing. Where it gets tricky is when you try and oversell something that isn’t that thing, or you aren’t using any leverage and you just expect the market to just kind of meet your book when you don’t do any effort. You expect the market to just embrace it which, again, sometimes that happens and that’s great. But if it doesn’t, it’s time to look in the mirror and be like, “there’s more I could have done for this book.” So that’s really all it is. There’s a ton of really great variety out there right now. I think the thing that’s exciting is that people are really responding to, like I said, books that are taking a big swing and you see that with the creator-owned market, you see it with the licensed market, the Big Two and Energon and IDW and a bunch of other places. So for me, it’s a greatly exciting (if frighteningly competitive) market. And that’s all I was trying to say with it. So I hope that makes sense. Please, any more questions, anything you want to ask, go for it. I love this kind of discussion. And yeah, I hope you guys have a great, great week and we’ll reconvene later!
S
