Hey, guys, it's Scott.
It's Wednesday, July 6, and we have so much going on over here at Best Jackett in the next couple of weeks, so I just wanted to give you a quick primer. I can't even wrap my head around it and I'm a little bit overwhelmed, but I'm very excited. So a week from today, on the 13th, we have the first issue of Dark Spaces: Wildfire coming out.
It's co-created with Hayden Sherman, an amazing up-and-coming rising star creator. And it's about women who are inmates in the California penal system who were brought out to fight wildfires out on the mountains of California and decide to try and pull a heist. It's a noir set against the apocalyptic wildfires that happen, like, essentially 13 months a year now in California. I'm really, really proud of it, especially of the work that Hayden has put in with Rhonda Pattison on colors. And it's a book that I'm doing with IDW under their new creator-owned Originals line, helmed by none other than Mark Doyle, who was a huge figurehead at DC at Vertigo, helped on Batman and all that stuff, too. He’s one of my oldest friends and a real champion in the comics industry. And Maggie Howell, who also helped on American Vampire and was a great editor over at Vertigo. So he's brought over a whole team, I think Jamie S. Rich is there now, too, who was another superstar at DC. So it's a great place and they've got a really interesting deal, if you're an up and coming creator, to look at. It stands between some other deals where you retain all your rights or you basically give up all your rights. So it's got a good thing going and I'm proud to be a part.
And they are announcing some other up and coming creators working within the Dark Spaces line that I'm helming with Mark. So part of the deal of being a part of the creator-owned publishing imprint over there was to be able to bring in new people. So I'm really proud to be able to support a couple of great books and creators by emergent voices. We're going to be announcing that really soon, like within days, so get ready for that!
And then, the following week, this is crazy, the following week on the 19th, a week from yesterday—two weeks from yesterday, sorry, time has become a flat circle since we got stuck in Seattle for me over here. We have our entire new wave of books coming out at comiXology. It's the second wave of Scottober stuff, we're going to be celebrating it at San Diego, three co-creator books with incredible friends and artists. The first is Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder. They come out simultaneously, so there's no first, but they're all coming out on the same day and then they fall into a pattern where they're coming out different weeks in a month. But Barnstormers with Tula Lotay, an old friend and incredible artist, it's about a young couple that barnstorms across the country and gets into serious, murderous trouble along the way. I'm deeply proud of this book, I hope you'll check it out. It's been in my head a long time and it's about how that moment in the 1920s that we think of as this odd stretch where rich people were partying in between cataclysms mirrors this moment in time in some ways as well, and the hopelessness that young people feel. So I’m really, really happy with it. It's gorgeous, her art’s out of control.
Second book, Canary. We've been working on this one a while I'm so happy with this book. It's a dark, different kind of Western. It's like a horror Western, kind of an A24 Western, about a marshal who's haunted by somebody he caught in his past that seems to defy all logic and now has to face that same kind of horror in the present when tragedies and murder started happening around this abandoned mine. So again, Dan Panosian's art is the best of his career in this. I can't say enough good things about him as a partner and co-creator, and yeah, I can't wait for you to see it.
And then thirdly, Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine. It's a book that's geared a little bit more YA, but should be completely relatable for adults, also. We didn't write it down, but we wanted to do something that our teenage kids would love. My 11 year-old Emmett is super into graphic novels and it's the kind of book that I think he would read up to the way he watches up to Stranger Things. Anyway, it's about a young inventor who stumbles across a perpetual motion machine created by Daedalus and finds himself ensnared in a web of intrigue that dates all the way back to the beginning of mankind.
So huge fun, they’re three wildly different books and the whole goal with this wave is to just push myself as a creator, partner with people that are going to make me better, try things I've never tried before. So these books are really different than anything I've done in the past. I want you to see I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is if you’re in the class. I want to show you that I'm trying things that push my own boundaries but still stay true to the core values of what I'm trying to say as a writer with each one, about the state of the world, about things I'm hopeful and fearful about for my kids, all of it. So I can't wait for you to see them.
Also, if you are a founding member, if you are a Black Jackett member, you have your exclusive signed cover, only for you guys, a beautiful, golden, shiny We Have Demons cover coming to you now, it is being shipped.
Also, as a bonus, just because we feel kind, we're sending you an exclusive Greg Capullo San Diego Comic Con cover of Nocterra trade number two, so you get a whole trade just for free because we are grateful that you guys signed up for our Founder’s Tier, our Black Jackett.
You also have your Blacktop Bill cover coming to you, signed by me and Tony, in the next couple of weeks. So you've got three things coming to you.
Regular paid subscribers, you've got your books that you sent down to me to sign a couple months ago. They're all on their way back, a lot of people have been posting pictures. So you guys all get your stuff back. Free people listening, because this is a free post today, there is not a better time to sign up, I promise you, for the paid subscription than now.
Tyler, list all of the classes we've done so far:
Next week on Wednesday, we have one I'm really excited about. I'm going to try and explain the difference between emotional conflict and plot conflict and how this double helix structure works in storytelling and how you can use one to bolster the other, contrast the other, how you use these as twin pillars essentially of storytelling, especially in comics. But the way that I would think about it is that the emotional arc of each story is what keeps people coming back. It's the attachment to the characters, it's the whole journey the protagonist goes through to change and to become someone better or worse or just different on the other end of the events of the story. The plot is more of a mechanism by which you get them there, so plot is always malleable in service of emotion. Sometimes plot can seem to supersede emotion, especially in big blockbusters or in thrillers, and make it seem like plot is more important, but it never really is. It's more in service of kind of the emotional arc.
So if you think about something like Stranger Things, we're watching nonstop, just to give you like a couple of updates. It's funny, my 11 year-old Emmett, who's obsessed with baseball, has become obsessed with Stranger Things. And my 15 year-old Jack is kind of at the other end of it, where he still likes it with his friends and they watch it and popcorn and whatever and have a sleepover, but they're a little bit more on the way out from it. But it hits that sweet spot with both of them, and I was explaining to them because they're like, “well, what's this arc about? What's the series about?” especially since I'm working on this comic book with Jack that I’m really happy with, which I'll tell you more about soon. We have an artist and everything.
And so Emmett and Jack'll be like, “well, this happens and this happens and this happens…” I'm like, “no, no, that's the plot, but whose story is this?” And in the first season it took them a while, but I was like, “yes, it's Hopper’s story. The second season, it's Elle’s. Third is clearly Hopper’s again. Fourth, it seems like it’s Elle’s again.” I'm only a few in, so don't spoil it for me. But it's interesting to me, because those are the emotional arcs. That's really what drives the series. The things that happen are designed to challenge support, bolster, conflict with the emotional growth of that character in particular, but other ones as well.
And we can talk about team writing more, or how you write for an ensemble cast in a comic, later. Essentially, what you do is you have one main emotional arc and then a couple other arcs that have much lighter touches that usually thematically relate to or contrast with the main arc. So for example, if the season is about growing up, growing apart, but coming back together, everybody has an arc that speaks to that in some way or other, with the main character having the one that really digs in the deepest and the others having arc that either contrast with the growth of that main character, mirror it, any of that stuff.
We can get into that more when we talk about theme, because a lot of the time emotional arcs and character growth and that stuff works around a certain theme that's being explored. Theme is the overarching idea or subject that's being explored in a story. So anyway, come join us live on Wednesday night, or watch any of the classes archived. There's so many now! You can learn whatever you want on all these topics from us for just seven bucks.
Also in San Diego, Founder’s Tier, we're all excited. I'm taking you out to dinner. I’m paying for it. It's gonna be great. You guys all know the info already (and more specifics are gonna be emailed to you soon). And any paid subscribers, you're gonna get a special line at my signings each day that I'm in San Diego. I'll post the time soon so that you can come meet me and whoever's with me, probably Greg or Jock or Tony, and get in before everybody else. Believe me, in San Diego you have to get tickets for pretty much every signing because they go very fast, so this is something that's a huge, huge value, I promise you that.
Anyway, another bit of news. You must must must go check out the new Batman with pal Chip Zdarsky writing, pal Jorge Jimenez on art duties, and pal Tomeu Morey from Nocterra coloring.
It's great. Chip has huge plans for it and he's going to make Gotham proud, as all of them are.
Soon, also, other friends Ram V and Rafael Albuquerque are going to be on Detective Comics. So you should check that out.
Gotham is in incredible hands with those guys. So definitely, definitely go pick those up. I will be back tomorrow with a paid post focusing in a little bit more on emotional conflict and plot conflict and lots of more good stuff. So again, I can't thank you guys enough for doing this and I'm excited to thank you all in person in San Diego very soon!
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Newsletter #84: Best Jackett WAVE TWO