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Announcing...Razorblades: The Horror Magazine
Earlier this year, when quarantine kicked into full gear here in NYC and the direct-market American comic market hit a hard, then-indefinite pause, James Tynion IV and I got to talking. Well, we were already talking—I’m editing James on The Department of Truth, his upcoming Image Comics series with Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, and Dylan Todd. But James had started a quarantine reading project, and an early dive for him was the full run of Steve Bissette’s horror anthology, Taboo. The series is best known for running the first few chapters of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s monumental From Hell, but the whole, too-short run is a fascinating, often disturbing look at a moment in comics when “mainstream” and “indie” talents met and poured out their most screwed-up horror ideas into the same vessel.
I had copies of Taboo on my own shelf, and sent a quick picture to James, which quickly turned into lamenting the lack of a consistent anthology scene in America, and a series of thought exercises about what sort of book we’d love to read…or to contribute to…or to…self-publish?
Nah…that’s crazy, right? Bissette basically spent the back half of Taboo and dozens of interviews telling his peers that self-publishing a project like that was a fool’s errand. Well, James and I painted on our clown makeup and donned our jesters’ caps.
Introducing…RAZORBLADES: THE HORROR MAGAZINE.
I could talk a lot more about the genesis of the book, but Chris Coplan at AiPT was kind enough to jump on a call with us the day before launch and conduct a pretty extensive interview. In short, we got a bunch of pals, as well as some very talented strangers, to contribute short comics, prose, illustrations, and interviews to a nearly 80-page first issue of what we plan to be a quarterly horror anthology. Most of the stories are standalone, but we have a few serials starting here, and even projects we know creators plan to expand elsewhere.
Part of our mission statement was to give the rising generation of comic creators, especially those who already work in the horror realm, a place to explore the ideas that won’t fit in the typical mainstream molds—the ones that don’t make for tidy elevator pitches, or fit a marketable five-issue structure. Every Razorblades contributor is paid before the issue goes on sale, and fully owns all creative rights to what they create in our pages.
The response to our launch was, frankly, overwhelming. We were covered in places like The Hollywood Reporter, and we sold out of our limited print edition of 500 copies in under an hour. James and I envisioned Razorblades as a primarily digital product, and have the first issue for sale at name-your-own-price, to ensure everyone can get a taste. The print version was a late addition, half to test the waters on demand and half because James and I just wanted something we could hold in our hands and share with contributors. What we’re learning is that demand for print may well match or exceed demand for digital, even when the digital copy can be yours, legally, for zero dollars. We’re exploring options now on how to address this, and are thinking hard about plans for future issues.
James is justifiably having a fantastic year, between Batman and books like Something is Killing the Children and Wynd; and I’ve got experience in everything from comics press to traditional publishing houses to writing shorts in Kickstarter anthologies, but nothing fully prepares you for creating and launching your own self-published project. We are learning as we go, and now we’re learning in public. It’s flattering, humbling, terrifying, and plenty of other -ings.
But mostly…exciting. James and I wanted to see a cool, scary, modern horror anthology with top-notch talent, so we sat down and made one. Just over 24 hours later, it’s pretty clear lots of other people are just as excited about that prospect as we were a few months ago when we started dreaming it up. Now we get to figure out how to keep doing it. We’re just getting started.
I’ll post again soon, and talk more about my own short in the first issue, illustrated by the amazing Michael Dialynas and lettered by my good friend Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, but I’m going to cut this one off so I can peel my eyes off of a screen for the first time in over a day. For now, please go check out Razorblades: The Horror Magazine #1, which features a perfectly creepy cover by Trevor Henderson, and pay whatever you think is fair for the horrors we’ve assembled.
Don’t Read This, Kids (No, Seriously)
After an unbearably long time sitting on a secret, I can finally announce that I wrote a porno.
Kidding—but only by half. Any of my younger readers, or sensitive parents of my younger readers, or sensitive editors of my material for younger readers, I implore you to stop reading here (if you already disobeyed the headline, that is).
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to pitch for Limerence Press, Oni Press’s then-brand-new line of erotica and sex-ed comics. All props for this go to my good friend Tini Howard, who put me in touch with editor Ari Yarwood, the mastermind behind the imprint. Ari has actually since left Oni (on good terms!), but Limerence remains her brainchild and baby. Recognizing that there is a massive demand for sexy comics online—but that the few making it to store shelves were often one-handed reading for straight men with tastes stuck in 1992—Ari and Oni created Limerence to provide a home for inclusive, interesting smut and educational comics.
I’m not sure the idea for Cheat(er) Code would have come to me had this unique opportunity not presented itself, but I will be eternally grateful to Tini and Ari for lighting this NSFW spark. Illustrated with wild geeky abandon by Daryl Toh (@tohdraws on IG), the 120-page original graphic novel follows Kennedy as his long-term relationship comes to a messy end and he seeks solace in his trusty video games. But thanks to a well-timed lightning strike, those video games are way more hands (and mouths, and [redacted]) on than ever before. Imagine a sexual odyssey through your PS4 hard drive and you’re not far off.
Daryl was the first artist we approached for the book, and it’s impossible to imagine it under anyone else’s pen. Please, please peruse his Instagram—he’s a chameleon, and shares my love of horror in addition to the gay nerdy stuff. Cheat(er) Code could have easily become a visual mess under a less talented artist, but Daryl balances the funny, sexy, emotional, and nerdy with ease, and his contributions to the story are innumerable. A full sixth of the story is only in there because of a suggestion Daryl made, and the number of background gags he crammed into these 120 pages makes me laugh every time I review a pass. It was a huge relief to have a creative partner embedded in video games. Making this book, which is fueled by a love of gaming, with someone who didn’t already speak that language? Please. A nightmare worse than anything in Silent Hill.
I had two guiding lights while writing the script: John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, a film that feature all-real sex in service of a touching, emotional, often-hilarious story; and the dearth of MLM comics that reflect the less-sexy realities of gay sex and dating. As a preteen, so many of the representations of gay sex and romance that I found in comics came from yaoi, and it took me years to understand why those tropes were so incongruous to my own burgeoning experiences. I never expected one of my first full-length comic projects would be an uncensored, 18-plus nerdy erotica, but I’m immensely proud of the result.
Cheat(er) Code is absolutely a sexy story—seriously, I can’t stress enough that younger readers should STEER CLEAR—but it’s also a heartfelt one about breaking up and putting yourself back together. I’ve been nervous about how this book would sit alongside the rest of my work (hence the nom de plume S.A. Foxe—I don’t want any parents stumbling across it on Amazon, seeing Daryl’s bright, poppy artwork, and making a terrible mistake for their child), but I’m so, so proud of the STORY weaving in and out of all the sexytimes. Whether gay erotica is your thing or not, I hope you’ll give it a chance (as long as you’re over the age of eighteen) when it comes out September 22nd. Or hey, go preorder it now, like a triple-A video game that promises you extra cosmetics if you give Gamestop your cash upfront.
Anyway, did I mention yet that kids shouldn’t read this one?
Welcome to...The Department of Truth
Secrets are different in the comics world.
I worked for five years at Random House Children’s Books, and while it’s not as if every prose project is common knowledge from day one (Book of Dust was on our internal schedule for years before it became a real thing and was revealed to the masses), it’s much more common for deals to at least get announced before going hush-hush for 18 months.
For a multitude of reasons, comics typically asks creators to labor in secret until three months shy of release date. I was the last component added to this book’s team, and I’ve had my lips sealed for almost a year at this point. Now, thanks to this lovely exclusive reveal on EW.com, I can finally announce that I’m editing The Department of Truth, an ongoing Image Comics series written by James Tynion IV, illustrated by Martin Simmonds, lettered by Aditya Bidikar, and designed by Dylan Todd.
As James so eloquently phrases it for EW, DoT is about “about the truths America wants to see about itself, and the ones it does not.” The catchy short pitch for the book is that it takes place in a world where every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true: faked moon landings, JFK’s assassination, the Satanic Panic, lizard people, all of it. That’s not misleading, exactly, but it’s not the complete scope of the story, either. (You’ll need to pick up a copy on September 30th to discover that).
If for some awful reason you’re not already a recipient of James’s mostly weekly newsletter, rectify that here and you’ll get more details on DoT and some other exciting projects I may or may not have a hand in, as well…
For now, I can only offer my immense gratitude to James for inviting me onto the project, and for Martin, Aditya, and Dylan for having me. Every member of this team is doing career-best work, which is saying something when they’re all so prolific and already have such impressive titles under their belts. It feels odd to call the current writer of Batman a “rising” talent, but James is my age in an industry that still skews about a decade or more up from us, and Department of Truth feels like an important step in the “rising” class of comic creators really taking their irrefutable seats at the table.
(It’s not conceited for me to say that—I’m just the editor.)
You’ll be hearing a lot more about this book in the coming months, as well as other ~secret~ projects that will finally see the light of day in the not-too-distant future. Until then, enjoy Martin’s stunning artwork and this delightfully ominous Jenny Frison(!) variant cover for The Department of Truth #1.
Thursday Thoughts: Game Theory
I really did think I’d be able to keep up with regular blog posts.
The first week that the enormity and urgency of COVID-19 in America became undeniable, it didn’t seem appropriate to riff on some old comic book I had read, or talk about something I was working on in vague terms—even on a personal-outlet blog with a readership likely in the low single digits. The popular comic newsletters, the templates we’re all aping, handled it awkwardly in March and April, calling COVID-19 “That Thing” or “the thing we’re not talking about here,” inadvertently drawing extra attention to a thing they most certainly were talking about there.
That’s not to mock the effort, though; we are living through one of the only truly global experiences of many of our lifetimes, and it has an indefinite timeline and devastating consequences. The vast majority of us have nothing meaningful or helpful to add to the conversation, which is why most of what you’ll find on Twitter is either open panic or dubiously well-intentioned scolding, as people conditioned to a “micro-blogging” platform try to figure out what is expected of them during a pandemic. (The answer, insofar as public social-media statements, is nothing, unless the person in question is an elected official or public-facing health expert.)
As the weeks passed and it became clearer and clearer that we are in for a long-haul fight against both the virus and widespread misinformation and a seemingly overactive death drive among significant portions of the population, keeping up a blog that mainly exists to lure me away from social-media posting felt small and rude. My family also has an ongoing, non-COVID medical situation, and, against all odds, work has been picking up for me during all of this, adding additional excuses not to collect my thoughts each week.
Now that there’s a hefty, conspicuous gap between dates on my blog roll, though, I find myself missing the pattern of it. I think that’s something a lot of us are discovering as we adapt to working from home or funemployment (or, in the case of freelancers like myself, working from home as usual, except with a trillion new distractions): the familiarity and comfort of patterns and schedules. Prior to New York’s shutdown, I set my otherwise freewheeling work schedule by my boyfriend’s departure to and return from the office every day, which helped motivate me to run errands, exercise, and put a good dent in my writing while I had the apartment to myself. Now, I’m grateful for the extra time we’re spending together, but it’s harder to get out of bed when he’s still adorably snoring away next to me, or to pull myself away from a TV binge and hide in a quiet corner of the house to get some writing done.
I had also developed, for the first time in way too long, a regular exercise schedule, visiting multiple area gyms via ClassPass and running on off days. And since I cook for two and we share a kitchen with our roommate and his boyfriend, I enjoyed daily grocery-store runs to pick up stuff on a whim, rather than the more suburban method of weekly big-haul shopping. I was such a familiar face at Starbucks that several of the friendliest baristas follow me on Instagram.
Now, I can’t imagine setting foot inside a gym again in 2020, grocery-store trips are planned and executed like military maneuvers, and our local Starbucks is among the last scheduled to reopen (although, happily, the staff is working at other locations in the interim). I have been unbelievably lucky and grateful to have only superficial disruptions to my life during this pandemic, but the superficial disruptions are still disruptions, and I hit a low point a few weeks ago where days all blurred together and almost anything I did felt like a waste of time that could have been better spent in other ways.
That’s not an anxiety that’s exclusive to the COVID era, though; other have written more insightfully than I can here about the pressures of our always-on, always-available world, and the work culture that has sprung up around it. Compound that with the realities of freelancing, in which you must always be hustling for the gig after your next gig before you finish the gig right in front of you, and just watching the “wrong” movie or TV show can feel like a guilty decision. Is my morbid curiosity at the Olivia Munn Predator movie worth two hours of my life I could have spent watching something on the Criterion Channel, or reading a Great NovelTM from my bookshelf? Is this superhero comic I know will be mediocre comfort food a defensible use of 10 minutes, or should I be reading something outside my comfort zone to broaden my horizons?
I wish I could say that those questions led to productive answers more often than not, but my boyfriend could point to dozens of nights when I had possession of the remote control, relative carte blanche from him, and still remained frozen when it came to committing to a cinematic decision. But something finally snapped during the lockdown, as time ceased to follow a coherent flow and days blended into nights: Animal Crossing.
No, I haven’t personally picked up Nintendo’s adorable animal life-simulator, which launched with perhaps the most accidentally fortuitous timing of all time. But my boyfriend has, logging a truly staggering number of hours and diving off the AC shadow-economy deep end. Tom Nook’s machinations have lured him away from Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Dead by Daylight on the PS4 and held his attention on the handheld Switch, freeing up Sony’s hardware for me to finally, after great delay, commit to a few of the PS4 selections that have been stacking up on our media console for the last few years.
As my friends are wont to mock, it takes me a very long time to play video games. Up until college, I considered myself a relatively active gamer, but I found it increasingly hard over the years to balance my various media interests, eventually committing almost all of my free time to comics, prose, and horror movies. For a solid two years, the only game I really played was Overwatch, as I could convince myself that an hour here or there was a good brain-off outlet and not a waste of time. But certain titles on my video-game shelf kept staring at me, whispering that they were a valid use of my time and attention.
With my boyfriend terraforming his island and negotiating NookMiles trades on the couch next to me, I slotted in God of War, picking up from an old save file that had barely left the opening area…and I was hooked. There’s very little I can say about this 2018 hit that hasn’t already been shouted from the gaming rooftops, but rarely has any piece of media held up to the hype the way that God of War did, keeping me engaged with flawlessly smooth game play and the most immersive storytelling I’ve ever experienced in gaming. Even the games we think of as narrative-first, like the BioShock series, usually involve a lot of repeated filler dialogue, and pauses in the action to progress the story between sections of running and/or gunning. Not so God of War, which almost never takes Kratos out of your control, and delivers hours of dialogue during game play thanks to companion conservations that feel natural and loaded with foreshadowing. I guess the two big narrative “twists” in God of War, but in a way that felt rewarding rather than cheap.
More than anything, though, God of War was frickin’ fun. As my friend Jakob Free is fond of saying, the GoW developers basically made the best possible Thor game that isn’t licensed by Disney. The simple mechanics of throwing an ax that returns to you opens up some of the best combat and puzzles in any game of this type. After years of fretting over whether or not a video game was a good use of my 20-30 hours, God of War was the perfect reintroduction to the pleasures of sitting on the couch, controller in hand, exploring a fictional world that requires your active participation to reveal itself (even if a solid hour of that was just replaying the Valkyrie Queen fight over and over).
It’s unfortunate for the next game I played, then, that God of War was so perfect. I am an open and honest Star Wars apologist. I have a predisposition to enjoying almost anything with lightsabers and Twi’leks in it, unless it is actively, offensively bad (guess which installment of the Sequel Trilogy fits that description for me!!!). Jedi: Fallen Order was a no-brainer, then, even if its overtures at Dark Souls-like elements would otherwise be a deterrent. It’s hard to say if I would have liked Fallen Order more without Kratos’ shadow looming over it. Fallen Order is far from a bad game, but it lacked GoW’s polish, crashing on me four times and hosting enough bugs to distract from the otherwise sheer coolness of tossing Stormtroopers around with the Force. Some of the game’s flaws are inherent, though: it requires Metroid-esque backtracking but its rewards are strictly underwhelming cosmetics (another poncho color…cool); Force powers—and even flashy lightsaber moves—deplete a modest power reserve, meaning you can never feel too powerful; its least interesting character is the protagonist; the most common enemies are local fauna that don’t “feel” very Star Wars, and what’s a Jedi doing slaughtering goats anyway?
I certainly didn’t hate Jedi: Fallen Order, but it felt like a game that was unsure about itself, held together by a story that is sometimes engaging but largely predetermined. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Jedi Padawan Kal Cestis does not reignite the Jedi Order years before Luke Skywalker picks up his lightsaber for the first time. If Rogue One pulls off an admirable trick by convincing you it might not end the way you think it’s going to end, Fallen Order pretty much just asks you to pretend you don’t know what's coming when you boot it up.
Thankfully, though, I didn’t end my reenergized gaming binge with the crew of the Mantis. After leaving Dathomir behind, I suited up for Spider-Man, which is stunningly derivative of the Arkham games…and probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever played? To pretend that developer Insomniac doesn’t owe a big thank-you to Rocksteady for cracking the code on superhero gaming is just willful ignorance, but where the Arkham games barely walk the line of grimdark parody at times, Spider-Man felt like a wide-grinning love letter to the Friendly Neighborhood side of protecting a major metropolitan city. The combat and web-swinging is fluid and fun, the story is pure Spidey (thanks in no small part, I’m sure, to the involvement of experienced comics writers Christos Gage and Dan Slott), and the game does a satisfying job of balancing familiar arachnid expectations with just enough new twists to keep things engaging.
Those twists are part of what these three games share when it came to impressive story decisions: the ability to make seemingly secondary antagonists into worthwhile story-carrying foes. God of War eschews the most over-exposed faces in the Norse pantheon (saved, I’m sure, for sequels), Fallen Order hinges on the pursuit of Inquisitors, and Spider-Man eventually gets around to the big guns, but not before giving major profile boosts to Mr. Negative and Silver Sable, among others. It’s smart franchise planning, sure, but it’s also plain good character work, and an investment against the future. Martin Li was not a household name before Spider-Man on the PS4 (and he isn’t exactly one now), but now everyone familiar with that game has one more Spidey foe they can name from memory, which means one more Spidey foe Marvel and/or Sony can look at as a bigger opportunity.
Manhattan in over two months now, the longest I’ve been away from the symbolic middle of NYC in over a decade. There’s nothing in Manhattan that I can’t get here in Astoria, or at least that seems worth the risk of subways and larger crowds. But in Spidey’s Manhattan, I can swing across an impressively reconstructed city without getting sweaty or infected. I can remember all my favorite parks and landmarks and just the general vibe of the city that attracted me to it way back in 2008. It’s not a perfect recreation—it’s obviously shrunk for the game, with some legally protected buildings fudged and other things moved around—but it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen in a game, and unlike the Gotham of the Arkham games, it’s full of people moving around, without face masks or six-feet distances (although the plot does eventually get eerily close to the present-day calamity). I knew I’d probably enjoy an Arkham-esque Spidey game co-written by Amazing Spider-Man scribes I already like, but I didn’t anticipate just how reassuring it would end up feeling.
My boyfriend is back on (as in, he is literally playing as I type this) Apex Legends, thanks to a new roster addition. I may not continue my PS4 momentum into Last of Us or Arkham Knight, the next overdue plays on my list. But if these three games are the extent of my pandemic play-throughs, they served as satisfying reminders that there are worthwhile lessons to take away from all sorts of media—at least more worthwhile than the “lessons” I learn from noncommittal and wasting a night in indecisiveness. I may have had to actively force myself not to feel guilty while I was chasing down Odin’s Ravens, timing Force-assisted jump puzzles, and upgrading my web abilities, but that guilt eventually abated, and I enjoyed myself. I had fun.
There are worse ways to spend quarantine.
(Belated) Thursday Thoughts: 3/19/20
Hahahah as if anyone has coherent thoughts to share right now.
Thursday Thoughts: 3/12/20
Let’s get the now-standard disclaimer out of the way: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a virulent racist, anti-Semite, and xenophobe even by the standards of his time. His formative contributions to the worlds of horror, sci-fi, and weird fiction don’t excuse his reprehensible personal beliefs (indeed, it’s these beliefs that directly informed many of his classic tales). Even before he croaked, though, Lovecraft’s “mythos” was growing beyond him, in part because he liberally borrowed from and paid tribute to his predecessors and peers. Unlike, say, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, who are alive and well(ish) and continue to earn accolades and financial gain from their work, I don’t think it’s that complicated or controversial to denounce Lovecraft the man while still enjoying and building on Lovecraft the author.
Of course, most Lovecraft derivatives and adaptations are absolutely dreadful. I’m far from the first person to say it, but the scary thing about Lovecraft was never tentacles and fish people on their own, but the idea that we are incomprehensibly small and unimportant on the cosmic scale—that the gears of the universe turn with no regard for our insignificant lives, full awareness of the world around us will always be out of our reach, and our fate is not ours to control. Lovecraft protagonists don’t lose their grip on sanity because they can’t fathom a sea creature that walks like a man, but because they are confronted with knowledge their feeble human minds can’t reconcile with what they’ve been taught about the natural world. Especially in Lovecraft’s era, coming off of the industrial revolution, manifest destiny, etc., man was god’s chosen creature, and Lovecraft’s stories often knocked us down a few billion pegs.
It’s no surprise that this sort of horror is hard to replicate and depict in other media. For all that our species is still steeped in (willful) ignorance, we know much more about the world today than we did 100 years ago. There are fewer mysterious places left on the planet (in part because we’re actively destroying them), and “fear of the other” is motivated less by genuine lack of knowledge than by hatefulness and selfishness. Even many of Lovecraft’s creature descriptions (which were, on average, quite vague anyway) seem quaint now, after a century of wide-ranging and inventive monster design. It’s not as easy to describe the indescribable in 2020 than it was in 1920.
Visually depicting the incomprehensible is even more challenging. This past week, I finally caught Richard Stanley’s admirable The Color Out of Space adaptation, which was warmly received by Lovecraft scholars and casual fans alike. Stanley stays relatively faithful to the main thrust of the story, in which an alien “colour” (in Lovecraft’s original) comes to a farmhouse on Earth and turns things asunder, but updates it for the modern day. Nic Cage (who really needs to be taken seriously as an actor again after this and Mandy, at least in genre circles) utters a throwaway line about how the colored light he saw wasn’t like any color he’s seen before, but we as the audience see…pink, purple, and fuchsia. After all, our cones can only see the colors within the human spectrum of sight. What can be indescribable in text is rendered very, very describable on film. Stanley eventually takes the body-horror route, to good effect, but it’s a modern spin on the horror in Lovecraft’s original, veering away from the tools H.P. used in prose as a way to adapt the terror to the visual medium. I’ve seen reviews that call it “camp,” which, even more so than last year’s miscarriage of a Met Gala, makes me question what people think “camp” means. The Color Out of Space is an earnest take that gets pretty damn close to what one of Lovecraft’s most beloved stories was all about.
For my money, comics have a leg up over movies and TV when it comes to capturing the Lovecraftian. Unlike film, in which CGI or special-effects wizardry is called in for heavy lifting, the visual world of comics is completely controlled by the artistic team. An artist like Providence’s Jacen Burrows, for instance, can choose exactly when, where, and how to break from the reality he has established, and can move as boldly or subtly as he likes. One of Providence’s greatest strengths is the restraint Burrows and writer Alan Moore show; the book is jam-packed with Lovecraft allusions, but its moments of terror and confirmed supernatural phenomena are paced with great patience. There are a great number of fantastic horror comics, but Providence is one of the very, very few I consider actually scary. The reader may ultimately control the pace at which they read Providence, but Moore and Burrows provide a strong underlying suggestion, allowing them to punctuate our comfort at just the right moments. And because the entire world of Providence is crafted by Burrows and the rest of the art team, there is never a chance for CGI, wonky practical effects, or camera trickery to give the reader a safe “out.” Once you buy in, you’ve bought in for good. And by the time Moore and Burrows reach a certain body-swapping scene, your investment in the story being told is so complete as to be viscerally upsetting.
Black Stars Above, which wraps next week from Vault Comics, is one of the few cosmic-horror tales I’d place alongside Providence in effect and execution. Written by Lonnie Nadler, drawn by Jenna Cha, colored by Brad Simpson, and lettered by my good buddy Hass Ostmane-Elhaou, Black Stars Above owes as much or more to writers like Clarke Ashton-Smith, Arthur Machen, and especially Algernon Blackwood than to Lovecraft, as it dwells on the terrors of the untamed world in ways that Lovecraft, frankly, seemed too cloistered to tap into. Like Providence’s Moore and Burrows, Nadler and Cha favor carefully considered panel grids, solid storytelling and framing over flash, and a tight control on the pace of reading. Cha and Nadler also throw some of that out the window to impressive effect as the cosmic horror begins to ramp up, especially as they break established paneling rhythms. There are sequences in Black Stars Above where Cha carries your eyes along with the breakneck pace of the best-cut A24 trailers, which is the kind of control over the reading experience that threatens to elevate a good horror comic to a great, even scary one.
About a decade ago, it felt like we hit peak Lovecraft. The era of adorable Cthulhu merchandise may be on the decline, but surprisingly solid attempts from filmmakers like Richard Stanley, inventive recontextualizations like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (soon to be a TV series), and confident new cosmic-horror tales like Black Stars Above are a good sign that, a century after weird fiction’s biggest boom, we might finally be figuring out how to translate that terror of the unknown into worthwhile stories in all sorts of media.
Thursday Thoughts: 3/5/20
Last Thursday, I pre-scheduled a post that mentioned I was going to Disneyland with my boyfriend, and that we were hoping to snag a coveted spot on their new Rise of the Resistance ride. Good news: we did! More complicated news: I still don’t know what to think of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge overall, which I’m going to get into below.
First, some context: both Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Orlando opened up identical Star Wars theme-park expansions last year, with the aim of crafting an immersive experience on par with Universal’s wildly successful Harry Potter worlds. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened up with just one ride, the simulator-based Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run, as well as a cantina, lightsaber and droid workshops, and a variety of themed shops. Unlike Harry Potter, which launched with multiple original and converted rides, and hosted street shows and productions like the wand selection free of additional charge, Galaxy’s Edge tucks its lightsaber experience behind a hefty price tag, and its cantina (at least initially) required reservations just to step inside.
There’s no denying that Galaxy’s Edge looks great—both the Orlando and Anaheim locations hide the outside world so effectively that they feel like their own miniature parks, and there’s no place on Batuu, the newly created planet on which Galaxy’s Edge is set, where you can see immersion-breaking peeks at other parts of the Disney parks. But it also felt, when we visited Orlando last fall, oddly empty. There were plenty of guests, sure, and you could wander around and buy things, but that's about it if you didn’t want to wait for hours to ride Smuggler’s Run. When we visited, Hollywood Studios was still doing “Extra, Extra Magic Hours” for resort guests, so we rode the ride just after 6:00 a.m., had quick breakfast mocktails at the cantina, and then were off to the rest of the park by…6:30 or so.
Smuggler’s Run is also, unfortunately, one of the lesser Disney rides I’ve experienced from the park’s recent history. While there’s nothing like turning the last corner in the queue and seeing the iconic interior of the Millennium Falcon, the ride itself is a simulator not unlike Star Tours, which has operated in Disney parks around the world since 1987. For my “credits,” it’s worse in a lot of ways: while Star Tours loads 20+ guests into an obvious simulator, the rides you experience are randomized, and can come in dozens of variations, which are easy to update as each new film hits theaters. It’s also fairly turbulent, and can do a good job of mimicking turns and dives. Smuggler’s Run is, at least for the foreseeable future, locked into one storyline, which all but removes any incentive to line up more than once. And because of how much is going on during that ride, motion feels minimal—or at least not memorable.
The real deathblow for Smuggler’s Run is the way it forces interactivity. Six guests fit in each cockpit: two pilots, two gunners, and two engineers. In Orlando, Juni and I were engineers. In Anaheim, we were gunners. As the ride is fairly popular, there’s not much opportunity to request a role, and the only role worth requesting is pilot. The pilots sit up front, their view uncompromised by the other riders. They have the full console in front of them, and get to perform the iconic jump to hyperdrive. The gunners and engineers, meanwhile, have to mash buttons to their sides, away from the screen. And I do mean mash—I remember having to press a few different variations as engineer, but 90% of my time as gunner was just repetitively pounding the same square button like the world’s spammiest Street Fighter player. It genuinely felt uncomfortable by the end, and the times where I had to look away from the actual attraction to search for the right nondescript lit-up square were the opposite of immersive.
I could potentially overlook the side placement of these buttons if the interactivity was mostly illusion, but the ride does seem to depend on all six guests decently executing their functions, and after two rides, I have learned that Disney rides should not depend on guests decently executing their functions. While our Orlando pilots were acceptable if sloppy, I’m not sure our Anaheim pilots ever really understood that they were affecting the ride. The result, for the four of us who were in no way related to the randomly chosen strangers in the Han and Chewie slots, was a screen show of near-constant explosions and collisions, and a opportunistic Weequay pirate admonishing us all nonstop. Any illusion of nerd-cool that might come from stepping into the Millennium Falcon cockpit is shattered when two oblivious strangers turn your joy ride into intergalactic bumper cars. Two out of six guests have an outsized effect on what the other four experience, and that’s just not fun for anyone who isn’t in a group of six already.
I’m not sure how either the side-positioned actions or the variability of the experience got past Imagineering, and I hope the opening months of feedback eventually lead them to turn Smuggler’s Run into a less interactive simulator, because something with three times the wait and over 30 years of additional engineering on Star Tours should not be a more frustrating experience than Star Tours. But even if they do eventually take the controls out of the hands of tourists who aren’t even sure they’re really piloting anything, Smuggler’s Run is still locked into one storyline, with a brief Chewie cameo but a significantly larger focus on a character that has only appeared in the animated series, which leads me to my next issue with Galaxy’s Edge…
Who is any of this for?
Star Wars is divided into three mutually exclusive eras. Darth Vader never walked Tatooine alongside Kylo Ren, and Rey doesn’t meet Padmé Amidala. Clone Troopers and Sith Troopers are separated by a good half-century. The Sequel Trilogy, despite divisive fan and critical responses, is Disney’s current investment, and undeniably has mass appeal—for now. But in five years, will the average Star Wars fan want to see Hondo Ohnaka and Vi Moradi in a Disney park, or Darth Vader and Yoda? Does the average Star Wars fan even know who Hondo Ohnaka and Vi Moradi are? I’m a fairly active follower of the cartoons and comics, and had to Google “Galaxy’s Edge spy” to remember the latter’s name, as she only appears in a few tie-in novels and is essentially an Easter egg in the parks themselves.
As big of a Star Wars mark as I am, I am not looking to pretend I’m part of the saga when I visit a Star Wars theme park, or at least not when I’m just walking around between attractions. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter can pull that illusion off to a greater extent because Harry Potter takes place in a realistic contemporary world that has a hidden magical side. Star Wars takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. No amount of forcing cast members to say “credits” and refer to other parts of the park as “off-world” will convince me that the family of five in matching Blue Lives Matter t-shirts are just visitors from Naboo on a quick interstellar stopover.
I do have friends who have thrown themselves into the half-hidden roleplay aspects of Galaxy’s Edge and come away with a more favorable view of the park, but some subtle changes since the additions opened seem to indicate I’m closer to the majority reaction. A key architect behind the Galaxy’s Edge rollout stepped down from the company, menus were updated to more clearly indicate real-world ingredients over “ronto meat,” and cast members were told to lighten up on attempts to speak “in-universe.”
Perhaps ironically, all of these steps away from immersion predated the opening of Galaxy’s Edge’s second, and for now final, attraction, Rise of the Resistance. Guests have to try their luck at a virtual queue at 9:00 a.m. on the dot to ride it; we were actually in a standby group, but thankfully the ride had seemingly no down-time, and we were able to ride around 4:30 p.m., with many, many more groups called by the end of the day. And let me tell you, as someone who has visited every park except for Shanghai: Rise of the Resistance is easily one of the best rides in any theme park today.
Taking almost 15 minutes start to finish, Rise of the Resistance is the best possible version of Galaxy’s Edge’s attempt at immersion, with in-character cast members used well but sparingly, impressive use of space and misdirection, and every ride trick in the Disney playbook short of a rollercoaster. I won’t spoil any of it, but trust this otherwise cynical Galaxy’s Edge guest when I say the hype is real.
But.
I’m not sure how much of that next-level attention to detail was appreciated by all of the guests around me. At the risk of giving too much credence to one obnoxious woman in my boarding group, she complained about the interactive queue portions, laughed and talked back at the cast members, and didn’t shut up and enjoy herself until her butt was planted in the ride vehicle. I can’t remember what she said verbatim, because I wanted to obliterate her from orbit with the Death Star by this point, but she just wanted to “sit down and ride this already” while at least some of the rest of us were marveling at the consideration put into every aspect of the experience.
I think, more than anything, that she was just a dud of a person, but I wonder how many guests just want to “sit down and ride [stuff] already” at Disney, versus how many want to immerse themselves between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. Time will tell how lasting the ST era proves to be, but the overall derivative nature of the Resistance/First Order conflict, and the extreme time crunch of this saga—the whole thing takes place in just about two years—means opportunities to flesh out Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo’s stories are limited, and Disney’s decision to lean toward cartoon-only and original characters over the crowd pleasers feels shockingly similar to the thinking behind Darth Maul’s befuddling appearance in Solo. Disney is confident that Star Wars fans seeing the movies are either already consuming all the other media or are willing to, but signs point toward a more substantial portion of casual fans wanting to sit their butt in a seat—either of a theater or of a ride vehicle—without having to do the extra lore research.
Galaxy’s Edge really only works if you are willing to commit to it to an almost LARP-like level, but its marquee attraction should keep it neck and neck with Pandora for a long time to come. I just have to wonder what Disney could have accomplished if they eased up on the immersion and aimed the park at the average Star Wars fan instead of the super-consumer—and I say that as someone with a life-sized Yoda statue in my parents’ house.
But hey, the vegan options at Galaxy’s Edge are great. Green milk > blue milk, tbh.
Thursday Thoughts: 2/27/20
No lofty Thursday thoughts this week, because I am, at the time that this post sees publication, at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. If I’m lucky, I am riding/am about to ride/have just ridden Rise of the Resistance, the hot new Star Wars attraction. If I’m not one of the privileged few to claim a boarding pass each day, I’m still at friggin’ Disneyland with my boyfriend and some other Disney gays. Life could be much, much worse.
Rather than skip a week, I made a little teaser. I’ve been in the position, for a while now, of having cool things percolating, but nothing I can really share with folks. The grid above has three images each teasing three upcoming comics. It’s all scrambled up, and some of the images may be less about content than about the publishers of said projects…but this gave me a laugh to compile, and I’ll circle back once these comics become public knowledge. One is a completed graphic novel coming out this year, one is a series that isn’t technically 100% confirmed, but is close enough for me to risk jinxing it, and one is a short that’s with the artist now.
Back next week, basking in my Mickey afterglow!
Thursday Thoughts: 2/20/20
I’m edging up against a few deadlines, so today’s thoughts are going to be a bit more open-ended. (The first draft said “shorter” too, but, uhh…) I want to stick to a regular Thursday post, and I think it’s a healthy habit to gather some musings each week, but paying gigs take priority.
My boyfriend and I spent last weekend at KatsuCon in Washington, D.C., showing off his most recent cosplay builds (omgitscosplay on Instagram!), which was a breezy, unusual experience for someone almost wholly sequestered in western comics. Conventions centered around American comics and comic-related media are an awkward mix between fan expo and professional networking event, and always feel like they have a hierarchy built in between publishers, fans, celebrities, etc. I’m sure KatsuCon has a degree of that, with Japanese industry guests, voice talent, and well-known cosplayers, but it felt way more like a nerdy (very queer) prom. The focus seemed to be dressing up, seeing other people dress up, and just having fun.
Of course, that fun takes a lot of work beforehand, and my man had been toiling away night after night for weeks on his armor. Now that he’s between builds for a bit, I’ve been persuading him into movie marathons, starting with One Cut of the Dead, a recent Japanese zombie movie. I’d encourage you to check it out (exclusively on Shudder in the U.S., it seems) knowing as little as possible—One Cut of the Dead is a total blast, but works best if you don’t know anything going in besides the fact that it does have a twist.
I say that it’s helpful to know the existence of said twist because the first half hour of the movie may lose you otherwise. It’s hard to explain why without giving too much away, but there were definitely moments where I didn’t understand how so many respected horror fans recommended this film. But...we stuck with it, and once the film revealed itself, it answered my previous doubts and was nonstop fun until the closing credits.
This aspect of One Cut of the Dead sort of dovetails into a lot of the thoughts and frustrations I have about monthly comics and the conversations around them. The movie requires that you sit through a questionable 30 minutes before you really understand where it’s going. That’s a full third of the film, and way more time than the average streaming viewer is going to give something before bouncing. If I didn’t know that OCotD revolved around some sort of twist, I’m not sure I’d have stuck it out either.
We see this problem constantly in comics, and I worry a lot about what it’s doing to the artistic side of the medium (not the actual art, but comics-as-art). But the most frustrating aspect might be how easy it is to sympathize with both “sides” of this debate.
Comic shelves are full to bursting with options, and, as my pal James Tynion IV’s latest newsletter framed it, each new comic isn’t just competing with everything else coming out this month, but with every comic that came before it that’s still popular and in print. To some extent, we’re all up against Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s greatest hits forever, as if there wasn’t already enough pressure in this business.
Approached from that angle, it makes sense that the average reader doesn’t have the equivalent of a half hour of runtime to give to comics that take a while to get to the point. It’s part of why we see so many books sold on their “high concepts” alone—get the reader to grab the issue based on the elevator pitch, and hope they like the characters and setting and storytelling method enough to stick around. Especially as comics climb in price, and established publishers do everything they can to make you feel compelled to pick up their entire interconnected line, Joe or Jane Comicfan may not have the budget, will, and/or time to read an entire arc of a new series to see if they’re into it.
From the shrewdest of financial angles, I get why rushing that first-issue hook makes total sense. From a storytelling standpoint, though...I can’t help but wonder how many comics are getting screwed over by this impulse. Without naming names, how many creator-owned comics have you picked up that lead with a heavily front-loaded, hook/twist-driven first issue, and then just...peter out? How many times have you gotten to the second or third issue of an original series and struggled to recall character names or motivations, because so much of the first arc revolves around that initial conceptual hook or twist?
Or, how many times have you seen a first issue, either original or corporate IP, that’s heralded by comics press and fans as the hot new item, only for future issues to be largely overlooked as they settle into a more sustainable rhythm? It doesn’t take a drop in quality to prompt a drop in attention—the periodical nature of the business is so driven by the Next Big Thing model that long-form stories feel like the exceptions these days, not the norm they were in years past. A book can stay really heckin’ good for a dozen issues but lose its “moment” because 15 other hot new books come out in the meantime, and we only have so much time, attention, and hype to throw around. There are counter-examples to be made: Immortal Hulk, for instance, is the rare case of a book just being consistently great and surprising enough to rise to the top without any gimmicks. It has regularly reinvented itself, but always in service of the same story Al Ewing and Joe Bennett started in issue #1.
I can’t help but wonder, though, how many beloved runs may never have existed if creators weren’t given sufficient runway to launch. Grant Morrison’s Animal Man doesn’t really come into focus until after its first arc. I’m in the camp of readers who enjoy the first volume of The Sandman, but I understand the frequent line that it doesn’t “get good” until its second storyline. Transmetropolitan is one of the most relevant, most prescient comics ever published, but I can’t blame anyone whose takeaway from the first issue alone is that Spider Jerusalem is too much of an irredeemable ass to stick with for 60 issues. And these are just verified classics we’re talking about here, let alone the could-have-beens that don’t instantly come to mind.
The current X-books are another interesting case. I was glued to X-Twitter while House of X and Powers of X were coming out on a weekly schedule, and watching the shift some readers experienced from HoXPoX to the Dawn of X ongoing-series rollout drove me crazy. When HoXPoX was weekly, a high percentage of readers could weather one or two issues that didn’t do much for them, or didn’t seem to move the plot along too substantially. But when DoX started, even on the initial accelerated shipping schedules, a portion of HoXPoX readers bounced almost immediately. It didn’t matter to them that Hickman’s goal was always to set up a new status quo that will play out across the line for a few years and open up the sandbox to other creators—they wanted the central story/mystery and they wanted it ASAP. For those readers, the ideal Hickman X-era may well have been just another six or 12 issues to finish HoXPoX like one mega-event, rather than a full line as intended.
That’s not to say that those fans were the majority. The DoX books are doing well across the board, and are even gaining readers in some cases. Two of the ongoings, Excalibur and X-Force, leaned into the goodwill earned by HoXPoX to tease out their premises over several issues, rather than arriving at the pitch in #1. X-Force #1 does end on a big cliffhanger, but it takes three full issues to really assemble the titular X-Force and give the team its marching orders. Ben Percy could build that pacing out because Hickman hooked enough readers to lower the attrition risk, and because Marvel committed to getting the DoX books out on a biweekly basis at first. Had X-Force launched on its own during a different era, with rising talent like Percy and Joshua Cassara, taking three whole monthly issues to get to “the point” could have been a death sentence.
This month, the DoX books are beginning their second arcs, and already I see readers giving up and declaring the whole thing a bust because it’s no longer a single puzzle unfolding weekly, but an ongoing playground for a wide array of Krakoa-related stories. From my perspective, HoXPoX was always a launch pad, and as invested as I was in the 12-issue setup, I was in it for the long haul. For others, though, HoXPoX was Hickman’s allotted 30 minutes, and the fact that DoX didn’t immediately replicate and increase the constant dopamine hits of HoXPoX means that 30 minutes is up.
There are no easy solutions here—I promised an open-ended question, and that’s what you’re getting if you’re reading this—but it’s something we could all stand to think about. Who gets a runway and who doesn’t, and what are we losing as creators and as readers when we take that runway away? Someone of Hickman’s standing can afford to lose impatient readers, but newer talents haven’t built up that cushion yet, and may have to choose between risking reader attrition and comprising the best format and pacing for their stories. The former seems like the more immediate danger, but how much long-term damage are we doing when we force books into that quick-hit format? And how do those of us in the beginning stages of our careers get readers to give us that 30-minute window in the first place? As I work on some of my first multi-issue projects, these are the big thoughts hanging over my head. Well, and how awesome One Cut of the Dead was, anyway. Seriously—Shudder, stream it.
Covers, Covers, Covers
While I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with Jeff Bezos’ online superstore, checking Amazon regularly is a great way to find out when my upcoming books have been announced with covers. In lieu of any lofty thoughts this Thursday, I’ve updated the site with 11 (!) new books and covers. You can read all about them under the Comics and Children’s Books tabs, but here’s a quick rundown:
On the licensed front, my first project from Penguin is up for preorder—a picture-book adaptation of an episode of a cartoon adapted from a picture-book series! Llama Llama is a delight, and it was a ton of fun to bring this vacation story from the screen to the page.
I’m also thrilled to be headed back to the world of Pokémon for an ABC book starring ‘mon from every generation, including Galar! Now that I’ve finally put in the time to finish Sword, I can truly appreciate this alphabetical tour of the Pokéworld.
Two books I actually spotted after the first draft of this post—new Super Wings early readers! If the amount of Amazon reviews for the first three I wrote are any indication, this cartoon is a hit with kiddies. Who doesn’t love transforming rescuers? Peep the other cover under the Children’s Books tab.
Moving out of the licensed world, the third (and final, for now!) cover for the Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian series is out in the galaxy, from artist Gary Boller. Asteroid Excursion was a blast (literally), and I ended up learning a lot about flying objects in space.
Speaking of learning: something totally new for me! Since the first Mr. Kazarian covered gas giants and ice giants, my lovely editor Krissy asked me to write four nonfiction planets books for the youngest burgeoning scientists. Above is just one of the covers, but all four can be seen under the Children’s Books tab.
Finally, Capstone invited me to contribute to their new Scary Graphics line of kids horror comics, and I’m beyond pleased to share that, despite being for younger readers, happy endings were not mandatory. Beach Nightmare and What’s in the Woods?, both illustrated by Alan Brown, should happily inspire more than a few nightmares.
In the next week or two, I should be able to reveal the cover of a very different kind of project from anything else I’ve worked on—one that’s been in the works for a couple of years, is targeted at a very different age range and audience, and will even be published under a kinda-sorta pen name for…reasons.
Stay tuned!
Thursday Thoughts: 2/6/20
“If we only have so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”—Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
I’m going to be tweeting a lot less. I don’t have the following to justify a newsletter just yet, but I do have a blog tab here, and that’s reason enough to redirect the energy I might expend tweeting into longer, more considered thoughts—at least once a week, anyway. And, like booking a workout class or promising my boyfriend that I’ll walk the dog a certain number of times a week, I’m hoping calling this “Thursday Thoughts” and pushing it out into the world will hold me accountable to collecting my reflections like this regularly.
I ended 2019 reading Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, took a detour into darkly fantastic fiction, and then followed up with Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. Taken as a trio, these three books didn’t necessarily change the way I look at my iPhone, but they certainly called my bluff. Like so many of us, I’ve spent years bemoaning a little black box full of endless content, even as I refuse to look away from it. And I’m exactly the right age (and in the same generational cohort as all three of the above authors) to have grown up with social media in its modern form: weaned on MySpace, early to Facebook, on Twitter when it seemed like a passing fad, posting to Instagram before Facebook snatched it up.
Trick Mirror covers a range of topics, from reality TV to the wedding-industrial complex, but the first essay, “The I in the Internet,” drilled itself into my brain. I’ve been recommending it to everyone who’ll listen; one friend who read it is deactivating her Facebook account. Tolentino, from her time at Jezebel to her current post at The New Yorker, is uniquely skilled at putting our age group’s malaise into focus, largely because she avoids being prescriptive. She doesn’t offer answers, because so many of the problems we’re trying to solve just don’t have them, or at least don’t have solutions that won’t cascade into other problems. “The I in the Internet” is peak Tolentino, in that she cuts to the heart of why the current social-media landscape is so hellish: it’s not just that we all think we have something to say, but that we feel duty-bound and actively encouraged to say it, no matter how uninformed or unnecessary our contributions may be.
Odell’s provocatively titled How to Do Nothing certainly has a lot of Odell in it (she’s quite the birder!), but it’s a sociological text, not a memoir. If Trick Mirror’s lead essay put into words the general unease I have with social media, Odell spends her page count not just explaining how we got here, but how serious the ramifications of an always-on world can get, on personal, societal, and even environmental levels.
Of the three, Uncanny Valley has the least to “say,” but I still devoured it in under 48 hours. Weiner was a go-nowhere assistant at a literary agency just as the most recent start-up boom took off, and found herself shipping off from NYC to San Francisco, shedding more and more of her literary-world pride and moral misgivings the longer she stayed. Of course, we know before opening the book how it ends: Weiner is back in the book world, albeit on a different side of the contract negotiation.
While I got the sense that I’d have bristled at Weiner’s pretensions had we met during her Brooklyn days, reading her firsthand account of what happens when you give a bunch of under-25 software engineers untold sums of money and embolden them to turn the world upside down was a 275-page sustained panic attack. Whether because of NDAs or just a clever editorial choice, Weiner never identifies the startups and apps by name, but it’s always clear who she’s talking about, as one industry after another gets “disrupted,” and immense violations of personal privacy are brushed aside in the name of optimization.
Weiner’s memoir is full of the kind of people who would take Odell’s awareness advice in exactly the wrong way—who think the point of life is “hacking” your body and routines for superhuman productivity; for whom something like a walk through a garden to listen for birds would be a waste of time unless it offered a direct correlation to increased work output afterward.
Back to birds, because I have tickets to see Birds of Prey shortly, and because this essay was supposed to be about a certain blue bird.
“I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding,” Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “This is its own form of ‘research,’ and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.”
Most of us are aware that the bird app, to steal a naming convention from Weiner, is not a good use of our time and energy. When I have conversations with other comic creators, we all complain about the petty dramas that blow up and go away just as quickly; the false familiarity it creates, and the expectations that come with that barrier coming down; peers who use it for dopamine hits, at the expense of their integrity. We all say we wish we could get famous enough to not have to use it, as if it’s in all of our contracts that we must communicate primarily in 280-character bursts.
There are benefits to social media like the bird app, and I have made friends and fruitful connections because of it. Meaningful change in the industry has come, often too slowly, from conversations started by rapid-fire thumbs. But I’ve also wasted countless hours that I’ll never have back, expended untold energy arguing with strangers I’ll never meet and whose minds I’ll never change. At the beginning of what’s sure to be an absolutely unbearable election year, moving away from context-deprived communication is one of the easiest, smartest, kindest decisions I can make.
The bird app—all of the apps, really—counts on my FOMO getting the best of me. It knows I will be tempted by all the adorable animal videos I won’t see, the breaking news I’ll discover long after it’s broken, the in-jokes I won’t get, the connection I won’t make. I lived in New York for four years before I had a smartphone and an endlessly scrolling app, so I know it’s possible to wait for subway trains and stand in bagel lines without it, even if it feels like an active detox program to do so.
The other thing that I talk about often with fellow creators is that the app is not the real world. Even when it feels omni-present, like every reader and potential reader is logged on and waiting to weigh in, it’s really nothing more than a small segment of our ecosystem. If you walk into a brick-and-mortar comic store and talk to the first 15 customers you meet about something that’s tearing the bird app apart, 14 of them will probably give you an awkward nod and shuffle past you to buy their Batman comic in blissful ignorance.
I can’t expect to do the same—this is an Eden/apple/snake situation—but I want my context back, and my time, and I have the power to reclaim both of those things.
And so I will.
Opening Day at Adventure Kingdom!
A magic coin, talking carousel animals, and a mysterious missing grandad. For Clark and Karoline, Adventure Kingdom theme park’s a wild ride!
A little over a year ago, my multi-hyphenate friend Matt Cody (buy Zatanna, coming soon from DC Kids!) tipped me off to Epic!, a wildly successful app that works like Netflix for kids books: almost every major publisher licenses their books to Epic!, which schools can access for free, and parents can pay a small monthly fee to use. As Epic! has grown, they’ve decided to break into original projects, and I had the great pleasure of writing and developing one of their first.
Adventure Kingdom is a five-issue fantasy adventure middle-grade comic set in and around a decrepit theme park…and beyond. Our two young heroes and their new talking-monkey pal are going to experience multiple rides of their life over the course of the book, all brought to stunning, pitch-perfect life by artist Pedro Rodriguez and colorist Sonia Moruno.
On top of all of that awesomeness, I found out last week that each issue will launch with FULL voice acting and sound effects, to create an immersive experience and help guide readers who benefit from read-along storytelling. And while I can’t share internal data, I was informed that Adventure Kingdom #1 had a GREAT first day on the app.
I’m insanely proud of how Adventure Kingdom is coming together, and you can read (and listen to!) the full first issue right now on the Epic! website and app! You can also check out a preview here.
Nom Nom Nom...
Korra always tries to eat my comp copies, but I’m not letting her have more than a nibble of the Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian Vol. 2: The Black Hole Bandits hardcover! You might notice that the price on Amazon seems high—that’s because these hardcovers are really intended for school and library collections. Tentacles crossed that this volume ends up receiving an affordable paperback edition in a few months, just like the first one did.
It’s perfect timing that these comps arrived when they did, as I just passed off my first draft for the fourth and final Mr. Kazarian to my awesome editor Krissy last week. It was hard to say goodbye to Mr. K. and the kids, but hopefully illustrator Gary Boller and I send them off in edu-taining style.
(And, thankfully, Mr. Kazarian is just the beginning for my publishing relationship with Capstone…!)
Happy 2020!
Steve Foxe headquarters seemed pretty quiet in the final months of 2019, but that’s only because things were very busy behind the scenes. The trick of publishing is that most things are done on such a far-out schedule, that creators can have frantic months of nonstop writing and nothing to show for it for a year.
Thankfully, 2020 is kicking off with fun new releases right away, including the first Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian paperback, modeled here by my parents’ cats, Emma and Wilson! Steve-written, cat-approved. The second installment, The Black Hole Bandits, is also out in school & library hardcover edition, which means it seems really expensive to Amazon shoppers but will get into the hands of young readers anyway. (I believe a paperback of that one should follow around the same time the hardcover of volume 3 drops—tentacles crossed!).
I’m otherwise in the midst of a major deadline catch-up to start the year, including a few new directions I can’t wait to share with everyone. Expect a busy 2020 around these parts!
Oh, Gorblux!
Summer always flies by, but none quite so aggressively as this year’s warmest season. I spent most of July in Michigan helping out family, which is why I never ended up marking the publication of Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian Vol. 1! Out now in library binding and early next year as a paperback, Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian is the first of four (!) books about the titular librarian, who is, indeed, an alien. He and his extraterrestrial feline help a small squad of Earth children learn more about real science facts, starting with the gas giants and ice giants of our solar system. I just turned in revisions for the third book and we’re finalizing topics for the fourth and final installment. Gary Bollers illustrates, lending a very classic kids humor feel to proceedings. Capstone, the publisher, has been an absolute delight, and I thankfully have other books already in the pipeline with them! Check out the cover for the second volume under the Comics heading, along with a new tease of another upcoming project currently in early stages.
"I'm On Time, Every Time!"
Oops, totally wasn’t on time with sharing that my first three SUPER WINGS books went on sale last week! Was a bit blitzed by deadlines and the holiday, but happy to have these on shelves. I wasn’t super familiar with the property before my editor reached out, but SUPER WINGS is an ultra-adorable transforming-robot cartoon for kids, with much better computer animation than my generation had growing up!
You can find these here, here, and here on Amazon, if you’ve got very young readers who like planes, deliveries, and robots. And I should have a few more SUPER WINGS books on the way…!
(I believe this is my first real board book too, which is a fun lil’ milestone.)
Welcome
If you’re following me here from Twitter, willkommen, and bienvenue—welcome. My name is Steve Foxe, and I’m a writer and editor. Until this past week, I oversaw Paste Magazine’s Comics section, which has sadly shut its doors. In addition to writing about comics, I also write comics and children’s books, both original properties and for licenses like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Pokémon, DC Super Friends, Grumpy Cat (R.I.P.), and Transformers. Before taking over Paste’s Comics coverage in 2017, I worked full-time at Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, editing an array of Young Adult and middle-grade novels and graphic novels. With my Paste days behind me, I’m pushing full-steam ahead into a purer freelance existence. In addition to upcoming licensed children’s books for Nintendo, Super Wings, and other properties, I have a number of original comics I’ll be able to discuss in the coming months, including a full-length original graphic novel from Oni Press. I’m also fully available to write and/or edit for you! If you’re looking for someone with an informed, experienced perspective in comics and children’s books, drop me a line at foxe.steve@gmail.com. I’ll update this blog as new titles and projects are announced, so keep an eye on this space. Thanks for reading <3