Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday the 18th, and I wanted to say thank you so much for all the kind birthday wishes over the weekend! I really, really appreciate it, and it warmed my cold and twisted heart. On a personal note, we did pretty much nothing, which is exactly what I was hoping to do. My parents came up and watched the kids so that I could go out to dinner with Jeanie. It's the first time we had been on a date in months and months and months, actually. I was thinking back and the last time I could remember even putting on like a button-down shirt or anything was for the Scottober party in October, and I don't know the time before that when we went out. So, that was really nice and then the next day we had a little party with the kids and I got to eat my favorite Carvel cake, Cookie Puss, which was fantastic.
And my 14 year-old, soon to be 15 year-old, got me shoes and some clothes that he tried to suddenly say I needed because he thinks that I look like a bum, a big dad bum. But it was a great weekend and I'm energized and ready for this huge week, because we have a lot going on. First, we have We Have Demons—the conclusion to our first big arc is out today, Tuesday, from comiXology. It's oversized and it's epic and I'm incredibly proud of it. This book might be my favorite thing that Greg and I have ever done, and it sets up the future of the series, so I hope you'll check it out. If you get that subscription to comiXology Unlimited, again, you get all the issues for the price of one and you get access to all of our other books. It's like a library card, but it costs the price of one comic.
It's a subscription where essentially you'll get access to all of our Best Jackett books. That means Clear #1-3, which are all out (and #4 comes out next week), Ghoul #1-3 (#4 comes out next week), Demons #1-3, and everything we're doing in the future—all the books we have coming: Canary, Barnstormers, Duck and Cover, Book of Evil, and Dudley Datson. So, everything for the price of one comic a month. I'd strongly encourage you, if you want to get me anything for my birthday, to do that. Because ultimately why it makes me so happy isn't just for our books, but because it allows you to fall back in love with comics by giving you access to thousands and thousands of other creators doing incredible things now and legends from the past as well.
Also, tomorrow night, 9:15pm EST, live from 4th World Comics, we have our first class of the year! It's going to be a little bit wild and wooly, I'm ready ready to go in there and start up again. It's about villains—I've never taught this topic before, so I have a lot of thoughts, but it'll all be focused on creating compelling villains. I really want to break down some assumptions and some theories that are out there that I disagree with in a big way. So, I'm gonna walk you through how I came up with my versions of the Joker and the Batman Who Laughs and other characters like Mr. Bloom and Blacktop Bill, even Skinner Sweet. So, I think it'll be a lot of fun. We'll try and build a villain together as well, so it'll be a pretty hands-on class. And it will just be me, no reading in advance.
So, again, if you want to check it out, sign up. It's $7/month and you get access to all of our past classes, right now there’s probably about seven or eight, and all of our future classes. And you get to send a comic of your choice to me to be signed, and we'll announce how to do that very soon, for no cost except shipping. And at the end of the month, around the 31st, we're going to be re-opening our Founder’s Tier (don’t worry, initial five Founders Tier members, we haven’t forgotten you!) at Our Best Jackett, which is a new level of subscription. We'll be talking more about it soon, but it will allow you to get sent exclusive covers only for you, variant covers that will only be for Founder’s Tier subscribers, and it will allow you to send me many more comics to be signed and all kinds of other goodies. So, get ready for that. I'll be talking more about it as we near the end of the month, but it'll be a big deal for us over here and a big expansion at Our Best Jackett.
And lastly, I don't even know if this is interesting to anybody, but Quinn got crazy into Godzilla over the weekend, which was a tremendous joy for me. Godzilla is one of my favorite things in the universe since I was little. I have a million drawings of Godzilla from when I was a kid to now, and I've seen every movie, and I have many, many toys. And I think when I was a kid, looking forward to Sunday Monster Movie Matinee on WPIX channel 11 where they would show Godzilla movies in New York City pretty often was just a huge highlight of my life. And Quinn got really into the ridiculous ones like Godzilla vs Megalon, where he slides on his tail and drop kicks (Quinn calls Megalon “the Buggy Monster,” and Godzilla vs Hedorah (which is the Smog Monster, which is a whole incredibly poignant and hokey and ridiculous parable about pollution).
It was fascinating because I saw in him the reason why I like Godzilla to this day. He loves the idea of this big monster thing coming out of the water that's totally scary on one level, and make go behind the couch when it comes out, but that ultimately has a purpose that's noble. Even if the monster winds up crushing us in our cities, he's a protector of the earth in one way or another. And it's fascinating to me to think about a movie like Shin Godzilla, which I loved when it came out, it took me a minute to get into, but if you haven't seen that one, it really repositions Godzilla as something completely alien and strange and scary and unfamiliar. It felt like it was a very resonant version of Godzilla for right now.
And it got me thinking about what I would do with Godzilla if I had a chance, because it's one of the properties that I'd kill to work on if I had time. But I keep thinking about it and I would love to do something that had to do with Godzilla in the past. So, Godzilla all the way back in early, early civilization and all that kind of stuff, and also far in the future, which I know they did an animated movie of which I keep trying to watch. But it got me thinking a lot about monsters as emblems and reflections of anxieties in our culture at the moment. And Shin Godzilla was really fascinating to look at again after seeing Quinn's love of Godzilla that is so simple and pure and innocent, the way I loved him growing up, and then wanting to see him reimagined as a monster that fits this time where it's almost like we don't deserve a noble version of him for what we're doing to each other and to the earth.
So, I hope you are thinking about signing up for our class! We'll be talking a lot more about monsters and villains. Thank you again for checking out We Have Demons and our books next week, Clear and Ghoul. And thanks again for letting me do this and the birthday wishes! I really appreciate it.
S
P.S. Tyler here. Just wanted to share a Godzilla poster drawn by none other than the patron saint of Northampton himself, Mr. ALAN MOORE:
Newsletter #48: Three Have Demons