Hey guys, it’s Scott.
And I’m so, so sorry it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these. It is Tuesday, July 14th. There’s so much that’s happened since the last post, and now I promise I’ll make sure that we do this more regularly because I want to connect with you and update you on everything that’s been going on. It’s just been a crazy couple months. Summer is wild with three boys of all different ages and everything. So big apologies. But it is Wednesday, July 14th. What Tyler, the best assistant, reminded me of is that we are now at our five-year anniversary, at this time of year, for Best Jacket!
We launched Best Jackett five years ago. And I wanted to give you kind of a little bit of my thinking back then. I was outside of DC at that time, I was about to start doing my own stuff. And Substack approached me and some other creators about taking a grant to be able to make comics. And what I told them was I didn’t want to use it to make comics, but I wanted to use it to launch a class. I missed teaching, but I also wanted to create a space outside of current social media. At that time, I was just feeling really, really down on and burnt out on social media and corporate comics, as much as I love being at DC. But I wanted to get away and reconnect with my own principles, wanted to experiment. I wanted to be able to try things that I hadn’t tried with new collaborators. And I wanted a new relationship with you guys, with fans.
I had really felt like in those years between 2016 and 2020, social media had just taken a real big downturn where I felt like I was constantly on there. I was very aware of trying to promote my own stuff, but also really weigh in on everything happening in the world constantly. And it started to just feel false. It started to feel performative. And I talked to a couple of really good friends about it and they gave some great recommendations. Vita Ayala was one of the real voices for me at that time that helped me out, just in terms of trying to find a reconnection to friends and fans. And what they recommended was instead of posting about things that we were doing and that we were responding to, to just go out and try and actually find people who were working in the comics community in different ways and connect with them.
And so that’s what we did at Best Jackett. And we’re proud of a lot of the work that we did publicly, but mostly behind the scenes with different grants for things like the Women in Comics Collective and trying to make a bigger effort to find new voices in all different spaces. So it was great. And I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me over the last five years to reconnect with you guys and create this community. It’s reinvigorated my love of conventions where I go and I meet so many of you that are a part of the class or a part of the newsletter. And it’s also just made me feel authentic, honest, and open and sincere talking to you. Just grateful to you guys for signing up for all this. I appreciate it. We’re going to keep it going. I will do a class, although I have to go to San Diego. I want to do this class that’s all planned out on cold opens, but things keep popping up. I have to go to Comic Con next week, so it’ll have to be after that. I will post my schedule for SDCC later this week as well.
But I wanted to talk about a few things going on that you guys probably have heard about. First, the Absolute Batman animated series. I’m so, so excited about this.
It’s been in the works for a little while. But what I’m really grateful for is how supportive Warner Brothers and DC Studios (Peter Safran, James Gunn, Peter Girardi in animation, and everybody there) has been about involving me and Nick in the creative process. So they hired me as a showrunner, which means that I’m the head writer. And we get Nick Dragotta as producer on the show and will be there with me in the room and my creative partner on it. We’ll get to really weigh in on the vision, the aesthetics, the tone, all the kind of same stuff that I did on Wytches. I had a co-showrunner on Wytches who I love and I think is fantastic, Marian Dayre. We have all these Wytches episodes all done already. So I know the announcement is coming very, very soon, I’m sure, from Amazon as to a release date. And I’m sure you’ll start to see materials from it advertised regularly really, really soon. And I couldn’t be prouder of that one either. But Absolute Batman, the fun of it is the way they pitched it to us is that they really want it to be an expansion of the comic itself. It’s not going to have some wildly different aesthetic where it looks like live action. It’s not going to be something that breaks from the ethos of what we’re doing. Having me and Nick there, with their commitment to it as well, again, I can’t say enough good things about Peter Girardi and everybody else there in the animation department. But that idea that they want to make a show that feels like its own thing. So it takes advantage of the medium, but stays true to the core values and aesthetics of Absolute Batman the comic. So we can’t wait for you guys to see what we’re cooking up. We’re going to be starting really, really soon in terms of writing and all of that stuff.
I can’t believe all this happened literally in the time I’ve been doing Best Jackett with you guys. It’s been nuts. I mean, I’ve been doing Best Jackett since I was doing Nocterra and Dark Spaces and all the books we did with Comixology into Dark Horse, like We Have Demons and Night of the Ghoul and Clear and Canary.
And there was By a Thread (final issue out today!) that I did with my son and the great Valeria Favoccia, Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine with Jamal Igle, Book of Evil with Jock, and Barnstormers with Tula Lotay.
And now here we are on the other side and I’m doing all DC stuff like Absolute Batman and consulting with the editors. And I’m very, very proud and humbled to be a part of initiatives right now, both internally and publicly. So the animated series, that’s going to be a big part of my job over the next year, just like Wytches. Production on season one of that is basically done. So we have, again, a bunch of finished episodes. We’ve got animatics. So we’re really, really ready, I think very soon, to start showing material and talking about a release date and the cast. I can’t wait for you to hear who’s in it. Super excited about it.
The other thing was that I interviewed Frank Miller for his book, you should totally pick it up today. I think today is the actual release date. It’s called Push the Wall and it’s a really inspiring autobiography and memoir. But it also marries his autobiography to different lessons about writing and art. It reminded me a lot of Stephen King’s On Writing but in Frank’s own way. And some of the lessons are just crushingly valuable. Made me really wish I had the book when I was starting out. So check that out.
But talking to Frank last night about following your own path, not letting the pressures of, “well, I should be over here,” or “what if I do this that’ll be safe?” Or “what if I try and be ambitious in this way so I can get this position?” All those kinds of things lead you to bad places, and one of the fun things about Frank in particular was that, again, it reconnects you to your principles. He’s somebody who’s been through everything. He discovered, I think, some of the stuff that made him want to write and draw in the first place, and I can’t say enough good things about that book. But before that, I got to hang out with Nick Dragotta and Paul Pope and talk a lot about what’s coming up on Absolute Batman.
And this journey, this book itself, what I’ve realized is the thing that I love is when you find something that pushes into emotional territory that you wouldn’t expect from the genre you’re working in. So with an animated horror series like Wytches, you expect it to be emotional, but this goes really deep the way the comic does. It gets really into the murk of how parents feel about growing older, their kids growing older, giving things up, sacrificing for their kids, and then how kids feel about realizing your parents are flawed people. It’s about all the things we don’t want to admit we think and feel about each other. So it really goes there. It gets really brutal. But then on the other side of that barbell, which I’ve mentioned before, this barbell theory, you push at the genre’s extremes. So you get insane body horror, insane scares, insane monster designs. Everything is outsized.
And it’s a similar principle Nick and I have brought to Absolute Batman. So you get into trauma from mass shooting. You get into the feelings of guilt and PTSD. You get into bonds that you have with friends you grew up with and the ways that some of those are problematic when people go different ways and all of this kind of stuff. And it’s going to get darker and deeper as we go ( and more uplifting as well). But you have all of that and then you go the other way when it comes to the genre aspects, the Batman of it, the action of it, the violence of it, the vehicles, villains, everything is outsized. With this anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I love writing comics and how I wanted to reconnect with you guys and then coming back and being fortunate enough to be able to do that through DC and Absolute Batman and getting to work every day with Jock on Wytches, which we’re going to bring back to print really soon. We already started working on it. I know we’ve said it before, but this time, believe us, we don’t want the animated series coming out without us having the comic running.
I’m trying to think of other things that I didn’t get to talk about that are going on. I was away with my family in England and got to hang out with Jock there.
And we were picking up our oldest son from a summer program he was doing in London for his first semester of college. He had a blast. It’s very funny, I suggested at one point that he was doing well, so why doesn’t he go and explore Europe a little bit and take the train. And he did, he and his friends went to Ibiza, which wasn’t exactly what I was thinking, but they had a great time and then he went to a Calvin Harris concert. But we went to Monaghan in Ireland where my wife’s family is originally from. We’re working on a property over there for ourselves. We’ve been tinkering with it for a really long time, a few years now, slowly building it up as a place to go over the summer sometimes. And it was great. It was a much needed recharge before everything happening now, San Diego and the animated series and gearing up for the announcement of Wytches and everything.
So I’m just really excited and grateful to you guys. I mean, it’s been a fantastic five years and I really can’t thank you enough. I mean, being connected to you this way where I feel like I can actually talk openly about my life and my work. I can hear from you guys about things that you’re loving, things that you’re upset about. It feels a lot more honest and a lot more robust than the way things used to be on social media. I still use Twitter and I still use Bluesky and Instagram. I’m there. But I mean, to me, this is where I actually get to talk to you. So I really appreciate you being a part of it and hope to get to say thank you in person at San Diego and any of the other events going forward. Thanks so much!
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