Hey guys, it’s Scott.
It is Friday, May 8th and I am in a hotel in Boston across from Fenway (enemy territory) picking up our oldest from the end of his first semester in college. I’m very excited to see him and see how he did. Hopefully he did not have too much fun but just enough. But we’re very very proud of him and very excited to have him home for a little bit. Anyway, a few things—first and foremost, let’s do a class next week! I’ve been thinking a lot about topics and I want to do cliffhangers, a little bit more on that in a second. So we’ll do cliffhangers Wednesday night at, as always, 9:30pm EST live. So I hope you’ll come check it out. Again, if you want to sign up for that tier, it’s only $7/month or $75/year and you get all of the classes that we’ve done already in a huge video archive.
ARCHIVE - Scott's Comic Writing
Here’s an individual breakdown of all the different Comic Writing classes we’ve had so far or are planning on offering:
And you also get to skip the line at conventions, which I have a bunch of coming up. I’m doing Motor City next weekend, I think, in Detroit. And then I’m going to Vegas at the end of the month. So yeah, seven bucks would be worth it to skip some of the craziness of those lines lately.
Second, Absolute Batman #20, the introduction of the Robins and a bunch of other crazy things that happen in this issue.
It’s coming out this coming Wednesday, Wednesday the 13th, so please please go check it out. we’re really proud of this one, it’s a slightly quieter issue in its own way but it’s also got a lot of the beating heart of the series, as does issue #21, And yeah, I can’t wait for you to see it. Nick Dragotta’s doing the work of his career, as is Frank Martin, and it’s just such a blast to work on this one.
Anyway I wanted to jump over I’ll talk a little bit about cliffhangers for a moment and then I’ll let you go. So right now part of my job at DC is, along with Joshua Williamson, to read and help advise or guide or seek out pitches for new books, especially for Next Level, which is still ongoing all the way through 2027. So there’s a lot of books we haven’t announced yet, I’m very excited for you guys to see. And I also have to read the first issues to help with the initial launch chapters of the story. So one of the things that I feel is the most common note that we give is that the ending needs to be stronger. I feel like it’s that and to make it new reader-friendly, which I did a class on last time. I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of streaming or if it’s an era of comics that’s gone, like eight or nine years ago, when there was really more of a predilection for these long, long runs where a story in a plot would go for a very, very long time. But the economics of comics right now, although a lot of things are overperforming and there’s a lot of new readership and a lot of excitement, really aren’t supporting very long, slow burn runs in any kind of profitable way.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t do a series that’s like, 20 or 30 issues that’s a slow burn. You absolutely should if that’s exactly what you want to do. And I love series like that. I’m just saying it’s a harder marketplace for series like that right now than it was eight or nine years ago. There were fewer publishers. There was more money from streaming and venture capital money. And there was also a more dialed in readership that was more and more used to, because of the uprise of streaming, stories that felt slow burn that you kind of subscribed to and then stayed with. It’s much more competitive right now. Again, there’s a lot more money and success and speculator market, all kinds of things, ways of seeing comics overperform, some good, some bad. We’re trying to stay really honest with the ones that we’re doing, but it’s a really tough marketplace. I mean, it’s a time of high economic anxiety where comics are really expensive and you have a lot of competition with things like Absolute and Energon.
So anyway, my point is that the second big note we give constantly is stronger ending, bigger cliffhanger. So what is a cliffhanger? I think the misconception is that it’s just this thing that happens in the plot that leaves the character in peril. But it’s really not that at all. I mean especially in an ongoing series, a cliffhanger has a degree of peril. Like, the car that goes off the cliff and they’re trapped inside of it. But if that’s what your cliffhanger is, it’s pretty weak in that people know implicitly that your character isn’t going to die, that the story is going to go on. So hidden within that high drama plot device of the literal cliffhanger where somebody’s hanging off a cliff or somebody seems like they’re about to get shot or they’re falling out of a plane or whatever is usually something that pushes the story forward in different ways. There are revelations, emotional twists, and I’ll go over the list of them in the class. And just to be clear, a lot of the time when we say that ending isn’t strong enough, it’s a plot cliffhanger that doesn’t have anything else. So again, it’s not about an ending that’s quiet. Those sometimes can be very powerful cliffhangers if they have enough in them. It’s about an ending that just feels like it’s not going to really grab the reader on multiple levels.
Okay so cliffhangers, it will be fun. We’ll look at some work I’m doing, we’ll look at some work other people have done, some of my favorites. We’ll talk about the different kinds of cliffhangers, the different things that make a great cliffhanger, and yeah it should be a good one. Wednesday night, it will be the night that Absolute Batman #20 comes out so I will show some cliffhanger elements from that if you want, totally up to you. But I hope you’ll come by and enjoy with us and wish me luck packing this kid up in Boston!
S
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