Hey guys, it's Scott.
And a couple quick things. So, so excited about the class. We’ve had way more people sign up than I ever expected. But there's still room and working to do a test run this week, so I'm gonna give it a shot—we’re gonna try Zoom on Thursday night. I think after the comic store closes, we’ll do a quick Q&A. So, if you're thinking about taking a comic class, if you've ever wanted to write a comic, now’s the chance—sign up, only $7 a class. And I'm using a good portion of the money from the subscriptions and everything to be able to fund some books by new creators as the year goes on. So, really, really thrilled about this whole leg of the stool at Best Jackett. I'm excited to get back in the classroom, so I hope you’ll sign up!
Also, tomorrow on Wednesday, Nocterra #6 comes out. It's the big, oversized finale to our first arc. It has big shocking moments, all the action, monsters, trucks, and mayhem. I'm really, really proud of it. And then the trade comes out, and we’re also doing a special issue on Blacktop Bill that tells part of his origin with Denys Cowan, Kent Williams, and Chris Sotomayor—so so excited about that as well. The series also will jump into its second arc right after the trade, so I can't wait to keep rolling with you.
But I thought maybe I'd do a quick post that gives the history of that series and also explains a little bit about why the book means so much to me and Tony, also as an example of the way that creator-owned books come together. Funny enough, though, I met Tony for the first time when I was just starting DC. I was hired to do Batman after Detective, and he was switching over to Detective after a good long run on Batman itself, and I was terrified. I was completely intimidated by the idea of writing Bruce Wayne for the first time. I was so comfortable writing Dick Grayson at that point because he was terrified and excited to be Batman, and I was terrified and excited to write Batman. We got along great. But now, Bruce Wayne was coming back. I was scared out of my mind, and Tony was one of the first people to really welcome me to the big leagues the DC, and we had to collaborate on this really weird beat where DC wanted to take the Joker off the table for the start of the New 52. For some reason, they just wanted him out of the mix, and so they threw in all these ideas about lobotomizing him, beheading him, all kinds of crazy stuff.
And Tony and I got to talking, and he was asking me my opinion, and I knew I had this Joker story in me if I didn't get fired after Court of Owls, and I knew it was about Joker. It was the first part of a two-part story—one was sort of a comedy, and one was a tragedy, and the first one was this comedy where Joker was coming to Batman saying, “I know that you're feeling old, and you don't really want this Bat-family that you've accumulated around you. You want to go back to being you and me. You want to be young, you want to be Batman, and beneath your face, your mask is just a Bat, like the way beneath my face is the jester of your court, who tells the bad news to the king who’s his best friend. That's me.”
And so, we came up with this idea together. When I told Tony, “what if we take his face off?” And it was crazy, and there was a lot of zaniness to it, but it worked, and Tony and I became friends after that over this severed face, so I guess that's our friendship started. And over the years we talked about collaborating. We only got to work together a little bit on Batman & Robin Eternal, and really it was like three years ago or so, I saw him at New York Comic Con, and I just started saying, “listen, I really want to take a year off after Death Metal, and I’d love the first book out of the gate to be something that embraces all of the kind of bombast and fun and heart and character of the stuff that I've been doing it DC. I think this might be the one that you’d be a perfect fit for.” And Tony was great. He was like, “you know what, I've been thinking about taking a break as well. What is it?” And I told him the story.
The story of Nocterra is: what if a darkness falls over the earth tomorrow, and sunlight just stops hitting the earth? And what we learn quickly is this darkness changes all living organisms into monsters unless they stay lit by some source of artificial light. So, if you don’t have a light on you, any kind of light, you'll start to turn into this thing called a shade, and same thing happens to fish and fowl, even trees and plants begin to mutate into these gnarled things, so it's a whole ecosystem growing in the dark that’s leaving us behind. And it takes place 13 years after this, and the main character is a trucker in this world—ferryman is what they call truckers here. Her name is Val and she and her adopted brother are just trying to survive. And the whole story is about them finding out that there might be this refuge where sunlight still exists and them trying to get there.
So that's our big first arc. But I told Tony the idea, he loved it and I think what we connected on was that, again, when you do a creator-owned book, it has to be something that's built out of the stuff you love. It doesn't matter if it's something that feels on the surface to be escapist, or if it's memoir, or if it's political. If you're building it literally from scratch, then it has the DNA of things that matter to you in it. I've become the kind of writer where I need to know what it's about and why it matters. You might be figuring that out as you go, and that's fine, but eventually you should at least know what it means to you. I know that if you're writing it and you love writing it, then it must mean something to you, so it's always good to decipher that stuff. For me. I told him, “listen, Nocterra is about this darkness that’s separating us and transforming us into things that are totally monstrous to one another.” And it was at a moment when everything was going crazy. Culturally, politically, everything was super divisive. Our kids were growing up in a moment it was, for me, really difficult as a parent, I think for a lot of us, to find anything to be hopeful about. And then the pandemic hit and it just exacerbated everything where it felt like you were literally being kept apart in a kind of isolation that was changing all of us into things we didn't recognize.
So, Nocterra just felt right. It was the kind of book we wanted to do for our teenage kids. That's what he said about his daughter, it's what I said about my son Jack, my older son who was getting into comics at the time, and I really wanted to make him something that he could read. And so, Tony and I were like, “look, let's put ourselves into this book.” And so, he brought a lot of his background to Val. I brought a lot of my own background to Val as well—some of my pessimism and my fears and skepticism about the world. And we just built this thing that we both really love. So, we can't thank you guys enough for being so supportive of it. We never expected it to be the hit that it is, and we have some really exciting TV/movie news to share with you guys as soon as were allowed. I think it could be as early as this week, probably next week. But either way, we owe it all to you guys for taking this ride with us. I hope you pick it up, Nocterra #6, out Wednesday.
And again, please, please, please sign up for this class if you want to take a comic class with me. We’re gonna really get started next week, but this week we’ll at least have a Q&A and I'll be putting up little teaching tips and assignments and stuff like that as well.
Alright, thanks again!
S
Quick P.S. I woke up to find that DC had sent me this amazing Death Metal electric guitar. I cannot thank them enough. I thought I'd post a picture of it here and let you guys see it too. I’m gonna talk more about my DC stuff also and the stories behind a lot of that stuff and celebrate a lot of the fun and the craziness that we all had as a team on a bunch of those books. But sometimes you get something like this, and it just brings back so many good memories, and we’re really, really proud of that one. So, thank you guys so much and yeah, let’s talk soon!
Newsletter #9: A Friendship That Started with a Severed Face