Hey guys, it’s Scott.
It is Friday, March 20th. God, I almost skipped two months there. And I am working today, but I am headed down to Orlando for MegaCon tonight. Jock and Greg and Sean Murphy and a bunch of other friends are going to be there. I’m going to be signing pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday. The crowds at the con are said to be big. The lines I can imagine will be very long. So what I just recommend is if you want to come see me, go very, very early. Like the minute the con opens, just run over to my booth. I’ll be there first thing.
And again, not to shill for it, but just as a cheat code, if you want to sign up for the paid subscription here at a Best Jackett, I try and do a 10-minute thing at the beginning of every signing where people who are paid subscribers get a chance to come get their stuff signed before the line actually begins. So for $7/month (or $75/year), it probably is a good option given how crowded it is down there. Jock is there already and told me even yesterday it was crowded.
Anyway, really quick, Monday is the last day to order Absolute Batman #19. This is the beginning of our biggest arc yet.
It’s seven issues as opposed to six, so it’s literally our biggest. And it also has super major stuff happening in it. #19 is one of my favorite issues we’ve ever done and Nick agrees. I think it’s some of our best work in the way that it typifies everything we love about the series. It has all the elements that I think make it something we love working on. It’s got big over-the-top action, a lot of horror and violence, but it’s also got a lot of heart. It’s one of the more emotional issues that I’ve written for the series. So I’m really excited for you guys to check it out. It’s even got a little bit of humor here and there, hopefully.
But yes, Monday is the last day to order it from your store. What that means is order it today. Some stores might not even be taking orders on Monday. But order it because every issue so far has basically sold out. What ordering it means is they’ll reserve a copy for you at your store so it can’t sell out for you. This one has the maximum amount of retailer variant covers. That means covers that are ordered by stores for their own shop with artists that they choose, not variant covers produced by DC. So we try and keep those really low. We try not to do a lot of variant covers on our own and just let you guys decide if you want to do variants, but this one has a really shocking number of them. So I was extremely excited to hear that there’s that much interest and demand. But at the same time, I was really surprised that an eldritch horror monster as opposed to a sexy, tight-bearing superhero got that honor. But I’m glad for Scarecrow. He deserves it.
One quick thing also, I wanted to talk about this subject I keep getting asked about, which is how do you redo villains? So I thought maybe I’d do a class on it if you guys like the idea. But I’ll give you like a super quick two-minute example with Scarecrow because he’s coming up. So Scarecrow, I’ve never gotten a chance to write. I’ve always wanted to do it. He’s about fear. That’s the core elements. You go to the DNA of a character when you’re going to reinvent them or you’re going to write them for yourself. And I would argue I had a good conversation with Matt Fraction when we were out in LA at the DC Summit together, just chatting about how fun it is to take these characters, whether it’s in the mainline or it’s in Absolute, and make them your own. When I was on mainline Batman, I always tried to do that too with Greg Capullo. We always try to reinvent them as much as we could. Joker as this character who was sort of a Joker card who would reform himself into Batman’s greatest fear constantly. Riddler into someone who believed his job was to make the world smarter, or at least that was the facade he put forward over his own egotistical desire to prove he was the smartest. And so on and so forth.
With Scarecrow though, I think one of the hard things over the years was what is fear today? What am I afraid of? How do you encompass that in a way that feels broad enough and also acute enough to speak to this moment for you? And it really was when we were forming a series that it came to me where I was reading a couple different books about the moment. I was reading a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobson. I also read a book called Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett, which is really good about super rich people building bunkers. And another one more recently called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky. And it’s all of these pervasive fears. What you realize is that you’re expected to go through your day while also knowing that all these giant seismic terrors are happening all around you, whether it’s war or genocide or climate disaster or economic collapse coming or political turmoil or the possibility of pandemics.
But all these things that you’re aware of, you’re not in a tribe anymore on the grasslands or in a small town or any of it. Over the years we’re subjected to this massive flood of information constantly. So you’re aware of all of this. And the feeling it creates, I was trying to articulate it for myself, but it’s anxiety. It’s a feeling of dread. So one of the books I was reading was talking about dread as a modern concept because being afraid of something is being afraid of something acute. Dread is the pervasive feeling that something bad is going to happen and you don’t know what. And the thing that really creates dread today, for me, is a lack of certainty, a lack of knowing.
So what Scarecrow is to me, he’s a straw man, right? Which is another term for someone who’s blamed, for someone who can be pushed over, all of that stuff, and yet is really scary, who walks out of the field and scares things away. Why are the crows afraid of the scarecrow? Not because they think he’s a person, because crows aren’t really afraid of people, but because they don’t know what he is. And so he’s the one that gets you lost in the corn maze, right? He’s the one that makes you feel like “if I only had a brain.” He’s the one that shows you all the things that you thought were true or not true. Things that you hoped weren’t true, might be true. And so that, to me, alongside his violent and murderous tendencies, make him so potent and so fun to write. He’s sort of like a country gentleman who just sort of walks around barefoot with this face and a hat and his crows and in this little brown suit. And he comes out of the fields and you don’t know what he’s going to do. Is he someone who is wearing a mask? Is he not? Is he an operative of the Joker? Is he just a simpleton? He’s terrifying in that way. And I love writing him.
So that’s kind of the process through which I try to travel when I make a new take on a classic villain. What are they about? What does it mean to me? How do I employ that or weaponize that in the book as strongly as possible? But I’d be happy to do a class if you guys want to see and I can walk through some of the stuff that we’ve done and some of the things that I’ve thought about over the years. Anyway, reminder—order Absolute Batman #19, don’t sleep on it. Thank you so much for coming to the class. And if you’re anywhere near Orlando, come by and say hi! Talk to you guys soon and thanks again for everything.
S
