Hey guys, it's Scott. It's Tuesday.
It's the last day of May and it is a huge day for us over here at Best Jackett. We have two massive books out this week, one digitally and one in print.
The first one is Clear #6, the finale to our first arc.
Clear is a series I'm doing with Francis Manapul, one of my closest and longtime friends and one of the best artists in all of comics, and it imagines a future where everybody connects to the internet neurologically and you can skin the world however you want. So the superstructure is still there, but if you want to look out and see zombie apocalypse, you see it. You want to look out and see 1940s glamour? You see it. So everyone chooses their own cosmetic reality, and it's a murder mystery that happens in this world. The finale of that book is today, so if you're a comiXology member, if you have comiXology Unlimited, you get it. If you're a Prime member, you can get it for free as well, so go check it out. I'm really proud of these two books today, Clear and We Have Demons. I mean, I think you'll see if you read across them that all the Best Jackett books are about things that are personal to me. They're about a future inherited by my kids that I'm really scared of in a lot of ways but still find hope, and and hope they can find hope and as well. So they're books that mean a lot to me.
We Have Demons #3, the finale of our first arc over there with the creator-owned book from me and Greg Capullo.
It’s our first creator-owned, and It's about a young woman named Lam who discovers that her father, who was a small town preacher, was actually part of a giant demon hunting organization and was like the John Wick of that organization. And his partner was a semi-demon named Gus, who is a huge, hulking awesome, Greg Capullo-looking character (although Greg does not see the resemblance, it is definitely there). Anyway, I've said it before, but it's kind of like a personal book that's deep fried in a huge burrito of fun and gore and mayhem. I hope you'll check it out. It's out from Dark Horse tomorrow. So today, Clear #6 and tomorrow, Demons #3. Clear is digital, Demons is in print.
And thank you, these books have done way better than we had hoped on all fronts and we're really, really grateful to you guys for all the support. Also, I have to continue shilling, but I'm shilling because, honestly, I looked at all the stuff coming up for paid subscribers to Best Jackett and it really did make me feel good, because I was like, please take advantage of us. All this stuff is coming up. So for those of you who sent in your books to get signed, I have them. I'm gonna sign them, you're gonna get them back in about a month.
And also, the cons coming up—I'm going to Summer Con at Washington State in just a couple of weeks and then I'm going to be in San Diego and then I'm actually going to be a Dublin for a day in August. There are other ones coming. I'll probably be at Chicago too, I think. But if you're a paid subscriber for just $7 a month, not only do you get all of our classes that we've done so far, like chats with everyone from Chip Zdarsky to James Tynion IV to Donny Cates and you get that whole slew of stuff archived, but if you go to a convention and I am there, you get your own personal signing for subscribers that will be a fraction of the line. Admittedly, and I'm not saying this to be a dick, the lines are often extremely long at cons, especially these days because I haven't been in a long time because of the pandemic, all that stuff. So believe me, the line-cutting alone will be worth your $7.
Also, you will get a chance to send your books to me to get signed sometime in the fall and people will have another chance to send a book, free of cost. All you do is pay the shipping. I'll sign it any book you want—trades, floppies, whatever. For Black Jackett Club subscribers, our Founders tier, all your stuff is coming. We got two exclusive covers. We've got the We Have Demons #1. Tyler, post photos:
It’s a signed copy by me and Greg that nobody else can get. We also have the Nocterra Special: Blacktop Bill signed by me and Tony that nobody else can get. That's coming your way end of June:
And in San Diego, we already have 25 or 30 people signed up for our dinner. If you were a Founding member in the Black Jackett Club, you get a dinner with me, paid for, at San Diego. We're going to do another one probably in New York. Don't tell you when I told you that, though. Anyway, that's going to be huge fun. It will likely be Thursday night, we'll post about it more, but please sign up if you're going to be in town and you're interesting, because we need to get a head count now. Founders, please check your inboxes for an email sent on 5/27 from bestjackettpress@gmail.com and RSVP. Okay, enough shilling...
Also, just one last thing, keep an eye on Chip Zdarsky’s amazing Substack because we're going to do some fun stuff together soon under the umbrella of Batman things. Be fun to have some summer chats!
But also, personal note—crazy weekend, our 15 year-old, Jack, graduated ninth grade and it was very cute to see. He got his first suit and he did really well during the year. I'm very proud of him. And over the weekend he came to me and he said he had an idea for a comic and it was based on something we had been talking about. I love this idea, so we're going to make our summer project doing a comic together! And I haven't decided if it's something that we're going to do on Substack at all or not. It's up to him. I don't know if it's something you want to see, but it'd be fun because I love this idea, and now we have to go artists hunting. So I want to find somebody who's up-and-coming and has a cool dynamic style that's young, all that stuff. Give somebody an opportunity that isn't quite fully, wholly established yet. And our other son, Emmett, who's 10, is totally into Stranger Things, which has been great. He's just started season one and he just binged the whole thing yesterday, and it gave me all these thoughts about nostalgia that I want to talk about another time.
But what it really got me thinking about, which I'm going to do for paid subscribers on Thursdays, is endings, because it's the last season to that and we have two finales out this week between Clear #6 and Demons #3. So I want to do a little thing on Thursday about endings. So if you're a paid subscriber, you'll get it. It's just going to be a little talk about endings that I've been really happy with in the past that I've done to some of the most memorable endings from comics, like Vigilante and other ones in the past, good and bad, how they've affected me as a writer. So that'll be Thursday.
What I'm reading—I've said it before when I was posting poetry and other things…
…but if I can give you any advice, read and watch outside your comfort zone, or outside comics, is all I'm saying. Because for me, my best ideas come not when I'm reading other comics, but when I'm reading things that just feed those other buckets, like when I'm reading nonfiction, when I'm reading fiction, when I'm reading poetry, when I'm watching a documentary, when I'm watching action or sci fi, whatever it is that isn't just comic adapted material. Strangely, that's where a lot of my influences come from. So right now I'm reading a book, it sounds like the most boring book in the world, it's called Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
It's by Thomas Piketty. He's a French economist. But it was a big hit back in 2014 or so. And it's a brick, it's like 800 pages long, so I’m listening to most of it in the car. But it's really fascinating and I love books that give a long historical lens of things, like Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and for fiction books like The Overstory. For me it's like looking at the ocean. It gives you a sense of humility, it puts things into perspective. It's calming for me in moments when things feel completely overwhelming to see them through historical lens, because it makes me understand a lot of the different forces at work, or at least think about the forces at work, and the ways in which things can change, and the way that things pass, and the way that you can be actively a part of that change in different ways.
So this book is fascinating in that way. It talks about different moments in history, if you're interested, when the concentration of wealth has become really acute in the hands of just a few people. So it’s whether it was in the 18th century with land-owning aristocracy, whether it was in the 1920s when you're talking about the whole Roaring Twenties boom and the robber barons, whether you're talking about a lot of the policies in the 1980s that deregulated business and stopped taxing the rich and essentially led to a lot of the things that we have now. And it's this really fascinating objective look at what happens when wealth concentrates and is accumulated in the hands of very few people and the rate of growth in a country doesn't match the rate of return on capital in those higher echelons of that 1( or smaller than 1)%.
And it talks about how that sort of circumstance leads to the middle class, if there is a middle class, or working class feeling isolated, feeling there's no social mobility, feeling there's no social contract and how that can lead to nationalism, how can lead to intense culture wars, things that people see in front of them and feel things are being taken from them when, in fact, really the big problem is the fact that there isn't a lot of fluidity, class-wise. There's no rungs in the ladder anymore to reach. So I love the book, I think it's really great. And it gave me an idea for a story I want to do in 2023 that you would think would be the most boring story in the world, but it's actually a crazy fight book. It's definitely one of the most cartoony and outlandish things I'll ever try.
So the point I'm trying to make is that you can get ideas for things that you would think would inspire different kinds of ideas but wind up inspiring ideas that are of a completely different tone than the thing you were reading, but speak to the same spirit. So for me, reading this facts-and-figures prosaic book on economics gave me an idea for something that's a wild adventure fight book in the future. So don't be afraid of reading outside your comfort zone. A lot of the time, again, reading comics, for me is not where I get my inspiration. And, by the way, there's also a documentary of this book if you want a cheat sheet. It’s by the same title, Capital in the Twenty-First Century on Amazon Prime Kanopy, which you can get for free with a public library card or university login. So you can always cheat and just watch the movie, which is good. It's really good, too.
Anyway, what it leaves me with is the belief that there needs to be a better social contract. It talks about times when there was a lot more mobility when the baby boomers were young, and in the aftermath of World War II when the New Deal was struck as a way of essentially rewarding a generation that had given so much to protect the survival of the country and the status of the globe. And it was less a redistribution of wealth than it was promising that people could move through different class strata, that hard work paid off and that you could be part of a company that would be responsible to you and accountable to you in different ways, and that that deal doesn't exist anymore. And I believe in that. I believe the idea that these multinational corporations and these extremely beyond wealthy figures don't feel any sense of civic responsibility, don't want to pay a 2, 3, 4 or 5% tax towards the country where they developed technology, the country where they began, or any of that stuff. It's just so depressing.
I don't understand the idea that you don't want to improve the place in some way that you grew, you began your whole journey, in some way. And I understand the idea that government squanders the money, I do. But at the same time, like, look—I've done really well in comics and I'm in a high tax bracket. We happily pay our taxes hoping that they go towards the safety nets and social programs that gave me and my wife a hand when we were coming up. Anyway, this is neither here nor there. This is one of the longest and most rabbit hole-y posts I've done, but I hope you've enjoyed it and on Thursday we'll talk endings!
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Newsletter #75: Stranger Things & The Wage Gap