Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Friday, May 12th, and first I just wanted to say thank you to everybody that showed up for that Ask Me Anything on Wednesday night, it was such a blast! We went way over, I think, like almost an hour and a half plus, because your questions were so good. I have to do more of those! And I'll try and invite on special guests too, like maybe Tony Daniel or other people that I've worked with, Francis Manapul, it'd be fun.

Remember, you can watch this and all other archived classes and Q&As by subscribing for just $7/month or $75/year:

And man this week really flew by. I miss the writers room for Wytches so much. And the people in it—Marion and Jeff and Bornila and Harrison and Kevin Kolde. I miss the show, I miss the things that we were working on, but at the same time, there's a certain thrill to just being in comics again, having my whole mind, my whole imagination just focused in one place. I've been moving fast through stuff as well. It's almost like I have all this energy suddenly being only in one place again and not being split over two different medium entirely.

But I wanted to talk about something today because I do this all the time, and I got a lot of questions, not just in the AMA, but over the years I've gotten a lot of questions about writer's block. And so I thought I'd do a series where we talked about a couple of different aspects of it because writer's block is this really vague thing and I believe that deep down it really is just the fear of writing something awful. And we all have that. I have it all the time, I still have it. So writer's block manifests itself in different ways. It can just be a paralyzing terror when you sit down, it can take the form of a kind of anxiety about writing, but it can also take some forms of procrastination.

And I wanted to talk about one of those today, which is overthinking and overplanning. And I'm talking about it because I was just doing it. I was working on this book, Duck and Cover with Rafael Albuquerque. And I love the book, and it's loose and fun and really smart, based on ideas that he had as well (that's why it's smart). But it's just a blast. And yet, I think it's because I hadn't been just doing comics for a while and I had been sort of split, like I was saying, over the TV work, that I was really intimidated coming back to it. And so I started outlining and outlining and outlining these last two issues and wanting to just absolutely be perfect in its outlined form before I dove in. And I always outline things pretty thoroughly, but not to this degree where I really need to know every single scene. A lot of the time I'll leave myself room in the middle of an outline to play and to explore. But with this, it was just over and over, I need to figure out this panel and this and this, and I was drawing on it and trying to figure out if I do lettering over here, can I set something up later?

Again, none of this is bad stuff. But there's a point at which you cross over into a zone where you know you're doing it because you're avoiding the writing. And that's the sort of thesis of all writer's block stuff, whether it's succumbing to fears of sitting down and working, or research which can become this general procrastination, overthinking, over-outlining, all of it. There's a point that something productive, or even healthy, can tip over into a place where you know it's becoming the thing that's causing you to avoid writing, from healthy fear to healthy exercise to all of it. And for me, that's what was happening here. It was like I was outlining and outlining and outlining and I knew, finally, early this week, I needed to just sit down and explore and write it. And so as I sat and wrote, a lot of the questions that I had, or the things I was trying to figure out in outline were answered, and answered in surprising and more organic ways than I had in the outline itself—character beats and surprises about the mystery behind why this nuclear attack happened between Russia and the United States.

My point is, over and over I'm going to say to you that there's a point at which you in your gut will know that the thing that you've been doing that’s been productive, or that's been a healthy defense mechanism, or that can even just be healthy fear, turns into something that's just keeping you from writing in a way that you have to just say enough. And the biggest thing is to sit there in the discomfort of knowing that you're probably going to write something you hate that day. And you probably will. The first day I was sitting down to work on this book, after all the attempts at over-outlining that I was telling you about, I didn't like what I was writing and it was uncomfortable. But that's when you have to keep sitting there. If you keep sitting there in that moment and you keep writing through that, that's when the magic happens, honestly. That's when you start to find something that you like, some thread, some spark, something to cling to that leads you to a place that is exciting, that's inspiring, that's not where you thought you'd go.

So again, writer's block series, one form of it comes from over-outlining, overthinking, over planning. I remember when I was at the New Yorker Festival as a fan years ago, and Martin Amis was on a panel with Stephen King, who was wearing an American Vampire t-shirt at the time, by the way, because the series had just launched, which was one of the thrills of my life. But they asked them “why when do you know a story's over?” And Martin Amis, at this point, has been giving you these long, really beautiful intellectual answers for other questions. And he said, “you’ll know it in your tummy. Right, Steve?” And he was like, “exactly,” and he patted his belly. It was like, that was it. And that's what I'm trying to say, sometimes you have to get good at feeling it viscerally in your gut, almost, when you've tipped over into a place that's the world of procrastination, or that's unhealthy, or that has just become time to sit down at the desk and do it even though you feel as though what's going to come out is bad. It's okay for it to be bad. There's no harm in it. It's going to be bad sometimes and that's okay, because you're the bad you get to the good. Anyway, thanks, guys!

S

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Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is May 3rd, Wednesday, although you probably won't hear this till May 4th, Star Wars Day and Quinn's fourth birthday, his real birthday. We had his party last week with a lot of trampolining and bouncy housing and cupcakes and all kinds of stuff. But he was born on both Free Comic Book Day and Star Wars Day when those things overlapped and all the planets aligned, the geek worlds. And I was convinced that he would either love all things geek and be like, the king of the geek world when he grew up, or he would hate all things geek because of it and shun everything that I love. So the verdict is still out.

But it was a fun weekend. On a personal note, Jack, our 16 year old is really into thrift shopping, which is becoming very fun to do with him.

And Emmett is just moping because the Yankees are in last place. But we go out and have a catch every day and it cheers them up. Both kids are looking forward to the end of school way too much in my opinion (but I am too).

And above all, I wanted to say I'm sorry that I haven't been posting more. The last week before this WGA strike hit was really intense in this writers room for Wytches. I'm gonna start showing you some of the art that Jock did as concept art for some of it soon so you can see what we've been working on a little bit. But the work has been fantastic. I mean, I'm so proud of the show. I really think it has a chance of being something that expands the perception of adult animation a bit. I mean, it's straight up horror, but it's also really emotional and layered and the art is really different for it. So they're taking a really big swing with it, which I'm hugely grateful for, to try and do something that brings in a new audience in addition to capturing that audience that loves animation already. So that's the people that are doing Invincible, so I'm very, very excited about it.

But it's probably the first time in my career, honestly, in like, my whole 12 or 13 years doing comics, that I feel like I really miscalculated the amount of work I could handle. And really, I was mostly wrapping up comics, or sort of in the back half of comics, that I was doing for Comixology and for Image and things like that. But when I was doing the mini-room, which was the smaller writers room that I showran to get us the greenlight and purchase order for the show that got the show to be confirmed to be on television, it was less intense. It was four episodes over 14 weeks and it was slightly more casual, it was a smaller room. I didn't realize how intense this would be, in the best way. I mean, again, I'm so inspired. I miss the room deeply already, even though it's only been a couple days. But at the same time, just the amount of work was fascinating and exciting and thrilling, but a bit overwhelming as well.

With animation, you have to complete the whole season before you can send any one episode out to be animated. So you kind of create a season board first, and then boards for each episode. The season board, you use cards, essentially, so it'll have like, 10 or 15 cards per episode that are just the major beats. And then you do a further breakdown where you have every episode, which has 3 acts, six or seven cards that are in an act, every card has a timestamp of how many minutes it's supposed to take, and all that, you break it according to character and plot. But you have to have the entire thing broken down before you can actually write any one episode or really have any one episode finalized. So there's this kind of totality that has to hang in your head. You have to see the entire design, which is a different format entirely from comics. I mean, I always have a pretty thorough outline when I start a series. I know what the arc is and I know the ending and I know the major beats, but I allow myself some room to play and to respond to the art. So having to have everything scripted and really down in a meticulous way before it goes out, it's just a new experience for me.

So basically, my day was get up, work on comics in the morning, and then go into the room around 9am PST/noon EST, but first usually meet with my co-showrunner Marion an 40-60 minutes before the room, talk about the day, what we want to do, what we want to accomplish, then be in the room till 3:00pm their time, 6:00pm my time. So about six hours with an hour off for lunch. And during that lunch break I go get the kids from school and bring him back. And then once they were asleep, I try and work on comics again. And so the last month has just been way, way harder than I thought. But now that the strike happened, and again, it's an awful thing, I was not rooting for it to happen, but I do almost feel like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when his parents kiss at the Under the Sea ball and all of a sudden he like, is whole again and can play the guitar. I sort of feel like that a little bit where it's wow, I have a moment to breathe and already, just in the past couple days, I caught up and moved through a bunch of comic work that I'm just excited to get back to also.

So I'll sort of be all caught up and ready to go back in the room really soon, but I didn't realize how much I was burning it at both ends until I had a day off and I was like, “oh my God, I’m just beat.” So all solidarity with everybody in the WGA. I'd picket it if I lived anywhere near New York City, but I'm in full support of everything they're asking for it. We can post more about it. Ty can post a link to some of the things that are pretty egregiously wrong with the system as it stands right now.

Big week at DC, go check out Shazam! and Batman #900 and Peacemaker Tries Hard! and go support that stuff, because DC is really killing it right now.

As for Quinny, he is sort of obsessed with Batman and tells Batman stories every night. His nightlight is a Batsignal. I did not do any of this. I swear he just likes Batman, which is both haunting and exciting to me. But he tells his own Batman stories, which are probably better than mine.

But Two Question Tuesday (even though it's Wednesday), the first one is:

Ken Janssens asks, “Do you approach plotting a four-issue miniseries differently than plotting an 80-page graphic novel?”

He's basically asking, do you work differently if it's one long story? And the truth is, some people really do. For me, I don't. I have this strange built-in muscle memory and also just taste for serialized fiction. My favorite novels have that kind of cliff-hanging sensibility chapter to chapter, even when they're dramas, even when it's something not as propulsive, not as genre-based. But I love that feeling of getting to the end of a chapter and being like, “Ooh, I'm really surprised.” And they don't have to be incredibly bombastic. But so a story like Book of Evil is written almost as one piece. I'm writing it as though it's singular, even though it's coming out sequentially on digitally platforms, I conceived of it as one singular thing. And similar with By a Thread, honestly. By a Thread almost works like a wire a graphic novel, but they're both going to be released in single issues. But I think of them the same way, I would think of something that I knew was designed to be single issues. I just enjoy that format. So for me, it isn't really that different. I don't know why, I just I love things that have that kind of peak and valley and sort of chapter break mentality. I wrote Last Knight on Earth like that, actually. It's kind of one long thing, but still broken into those parts.

Second question:

jsquillen asks, “what's a good rule of thumb for recapping the previous part of a story that is being continued?”

For me, honestly, I was taught at DC that you can't recap. It was one of our rules I never agreed with it early on. But the thing I really benefited from it was to learn that you have to be able to communicate information about what the series is about and think of it as a first issue for someone and execute that sensibility, even when you can't have a recap page. So it made me really think about how do I bring somebody in if I can't just do an exposition dump, I can't just do that Star Wars crawl. So what I'd say is try that, because nobody wants to open a comic and read a recap. Honestly, it makes them feel you have a knee jerk reaction automatically to feel like you missed out on things. Yes, it holds your hand and it can be comforting, but it also can be repelling. So if you have a way of conveying through dialogue without it being too heavy or too dense or if you have a way through communicating through action or any of what happens before, only if it's necessary information. I'd say try that. So there is no rule of thumb but I'd say use as a compass—the less the better, the more you can communicate in story, the better.

A little bit of housekeeping, a book I'm really really proud of, Dark Spaces: Wildfire, co-created by the great Hayden Sherman and with Ronda Pattison on colors:

Ronda actually colored my very first comic ever, I realized when I was looking back, Human Torch Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 over at Marvel, which I still get like a penny royalty for now and then, but I love this book. It's about female inmates in California's penal system who are part of a firefighter program and are out fighting wildfires and decide to pull off a heist. And it's part of a line I'm doing over at IDW with the great Mark Doyle, who was just promoted to publisher over there, and he encouraged me to do it. And it's just it's a line of books that’s really based on human interaction and pressure cooker scenarios. So there's nothing supernatural, no monsters, no superheroes. It's really almost like plays. They're not locked in a box, you move around, there's big set pieces, but it's all about sort of human drama. We already have the next one planned and I'm excited to announce it soon. And the line also supports new writers, new artists. We're doing a book called Good Deeds with my friend and incredible talent, Che Grayson, and we have more to announce soon. So I hope you'll check it out.

Also next week, Clear #3 (of 3) from me and Francis Manapul comes out. We're about to have some very exciting news on the TV/film front with that one.

And also Nocterra #14, which I really love, is out next week and that's also set up over at Netflix. So excited about that too. But this arc is something I'm really proud of and I love what Tony's doing on the pages. So I hope you'll check it out!

Now I'm going to move over and do the paid post, and what I want to talk about a little bit is scope. I'm going to talk about it over the course of a few weeks. We're going to do a class next week, I didn't anticipate a couple of things this week. My wife actually, crazy enough, somebody passed out with the wheel down the street behind her at a light and smashed into the car in front of her, barely missing her and Emmett, and it really rattled all of us. And just full disclosure, I just don't feel up to teaching this week because of all that. So I apologize. But next week, I'm really thrilled to be back at it. I'll post the materials with Tyler on Friday for it, and I'm gonna be thinking about scope. So I'm gonna move over talk a little bit in the paid post about thinking about scope and your story, how to expand and contract, and one technique that we'll take a look at, cold opens. Okay, thanks!

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Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Tuesday, April 25. Forgive my voice, this is the voice of a tired dad. Quinny has been going through a bit of a nightmare phase, like literal nightmares, and they're all hilarious and ridiculous where he'll just like, yell something out in the middle of the night like, “Let go my waffle, Emmett!” and then I run in there to see if he's okay and then he's already asleep, but then I'm awake and I can't shut my brain back off. So this is the voice of a very tired dad. But things are good. Quinny he turned four. I cannot believe it. This weekend, he's got his birthday party at a bouncy house—indoor playgrounds where I'm sure I'll probably injure my back or neck or something. But I'm very excited for it. He has Mickey Mouse cake (hail Hydra). And yeah, he's just bopping along, man. Our big thing with him is whether or not he's going to need these tubes in his ears. He gets these constant ear infections because of the craniotomy he had when he was six months old due to his skull fusing a little bit early. And so some of the scar tissue makes him more susceptible to those kinds of ear infections. So it's a bit of a drag, just that he's constantly getting these ear infections.

But Jack, our 16 year-old, is getting to the end of his semester. I always joke that like, if I wrote him, you'd tell me I'm being lazy. He is like a very, very wonderfully typical teenage boy in his affections and also his complete disdain for me sometimes. But I love him and he's great. And Emmett is high into baseball season. We watch every Yankees game and he is a wonderful walking trove of statistics. And we throw the ball and he's getting really good, we play pretty much every day after this writers room.

So things are all good here. Just tired. Next week will be the big WGA strike, if it happens. Obviously, I'm hoping for negotiations to go well and that there isn't a strike, but if there is, I'm going to take full advantage of it to get ahead of my comic stuff and also rest my body and brain.

But because it's Tuesday, I thought I do two quick questions for the free post. And then for the paid posts, I was going to continue on the second part of the topic I was talking about last time, which is how to create a sustainable or safe income for yourself as a comic book writer. Last time, we talked a lot about licensed stuff, like what are the best ways to try and make a living if you're doing DC or Marvel or IDW or Valiant or those kinds of things. And this week, I'm going to talk a little bit about indie comics, and some of the ways not just to make money or get paid month by month, but to try and create some kind of floor or safety net financially for yourself through the world of comics, okay? So again, you can always sign up for the paid part, it's just $7 a month. For that price, you get all of the posts that we've done in the past, plus every single class that we've done.

Our class is going to be May 3rd this time. We've got some great materials, and we're going to be talking a little bit about scope and structure. I think it'll be a lot of fun. But you get all of our past classes, like all 15 to 20 of them, and you get to skip lines at cons with me, and you get to send your books in to get signed for free and all that if you pay shipping. So I definitely feel like it's a bargain and I'm always hopeful that you guys will give it a shot!

But for the free post, two things. Somebody asked me last time about rejection. And it occurred to me that I talked a little bit about rejection in terms of the starting out phase of your career.

And I did mention that you'll always be rejected, you'll do stories that people don't like. But there's also like, a phase of rejection as a pro that can be really hard to deal with. And I just wanted to tell you like, a moment in my career where there was a real feeling of rejection and how I adjusted to it. Because my hope is that you see that it's not all support. It's not all easy. It's not all everyone loves what you do and that stuff all the time at all. And it's a good thing that it's not. And then I'll move over and do the paid post. So the time that I felt the most rejected, or the time that I dealt with rejection, I think, that really was the most difficult for me, came right around 2012/13. It was right as we were finishing Death of the Family on Batman.

So at that time, I was still in a phase where I was intensely insecure all the time. I really felt like even though Court of Owls had done extremely well for us, that I didn't deserve the job. It was really hard for me to write that book at that time. The stress of it was causing a lot of problems for me in my personal life and all of that. Like I've said it before, it was like being given your dream job before you felt like you were ready for it and you couldn't turn it down and at the same time you didn't feel prepared. So I was already a pretty nervous wreck of a guy. But I was really, really proud of the first two stories we had done. And I was friends with Greg now, we really were getting along. I felt we had something special.

And I was just getting my confidence and I felt like the next thing we would do, we had been asked for a while to do the origin of Batman for the New 52. And I had kind of refused because I felt like Year One was always the sacred origin. But then there were all these things that had changed, peripheral characters like Jim Gordon and Batgirl and Selena and all kinds of stuff, so that there wasn't any way that that could be the origin anymore. And there was sort of an indication that if we didn't do it, somebody else might get a chance to do it as a separate book. And so I decided I was gonna dive in, and I had this big plot for Zero Year in my head. But I knew there'd be a backlash announcing we were going to redo the origin. And I was sort of prepared for that. But it was important to me to do it. I've talked about it before, but I wanted to do an origin that would speak to my kids about Batman, make Batman brave in the face of things I thought they had to face that I hadn't had to as a kid. Year One and Dark Knight Returns put Batman in a city that looked like New York City to me, and had him facing things that like the threat of nuclear annihilation, corruption in the city, and all of this kind of stuff that was there in the miasma of the 80s for me growing up. And so I wanted to do one that felt like it touched on some of those things for my kids.

And so I've said it before, but Zero Year really came to me when my son Jack was young, and he went out to get water in the hallway and they had a active shooter drill in his school. Just a drill, but they didn't realize he was out there and he got locked in the hallways, and then he didn't go to school for the rest of the year without a thermos, he never went to use the bathroom, any of that stuff. And it made me realize quickly how his fears are insanely different than mine growing up. And so Zero Year has coded versions of some of the things I feel like are the most prominent anxieties for him in his generation at that time, at least, from terrorism to gun violence to superstorms to complete social breakdown, all of that kind of stuff, with post apocalyptic imagery and the endless war in the Middle East at that time, all that kind of stuff. So the point is, though, I knew it was gonna get a backlash for doing it, and so I was prepared for that. I was ready to not let anyone see what it was until they opened the first page, and then they saw Batman in his sleeveless, post apocalyptic get-up and realized that it would be something so different than Year One that you almost couldn't compare them. I wasn't doing anything that was expected, and that was the goal.

But what happened was, with Death of the Family, that was the first time I had allowed a larger crossover to happen with our book. When I did Court of Owls, they were all kind of one-shots. But with Death of the Family, there was a lot more tie-ins, there was a lot more Joker stuff on the side. And I looked them over in terms of what the basic nature of each one of those was just to make sure Joker was consistent. But the goal was to let people really use the Joker in the way they saw fit in their story. I've always tried to give people enough elasticity with whatever sort of crossover elements they use that it benefits their story and isn't sort of top-down dictation from me. So I wasn't paying a tremendous amount of attention, but they went over well, people were happy with them. And so I remember vividly being at a summit in North Carolina for DC and then having the last issue come out of Death of the Family, and I'd worked so hard on it. I remember just going over it a million times, all the dialogue. I do that with like all endings, but I was being really nervous going over it. And then seeing the review start to come in and getting some of the best of my career, being really excited, and then driving home from this summit in the rain. And I remember I had done the drive down to North Carolina, so I was driving up. It was like a fun long, multi-day drive. And all of a sudden, I start getting all these notifications on my phone about “I hate you!” “You're the worst writer ever!” “I can't believe I spent my f*****g money on this and this!” And I remember actually pulled over to just be like, what the hell's happening? And again, the critical reviews were pretty great and the initial response had been good, but then there was this like, wave of anger at me, and I didn't understand what it was about, honestly.

And it turns out, what I hadn't paid any attention to is the fact that people were buying multiple, multiple books, like they were buying all the tie-ins. And so they expected there to be big ramifications from the story. For me, the story was an emotional one and the ramifications were the breaking up of the family and a new look at the Joker and Batman. And I knew in my head that it was going to be, because we had been okayed now to stay on Batman for a while, probably the first part of a two-part story (Comedy and Tragedy) where the second part, Endgame, would have big ramifications. I wasn't thinking of it as something that was supposed to do some serious damage to the Batfamily, but people expected death, that's really what it was. They thought Alfred would die, they thought Jason would die, they thought Batman would die, or Joker would die. That was the big one, they thought we'd finally killed Joker. But there was a lot of anger at me for not paying off that title behind the scenes. Again, on the surface things had gotten great, and there's a lot of praise for the story, luckily, but on Twitter and to me personally, there was a lot of anger about the money spent without there being a big impact from it. And that shocked me. I mean, I didn't see it coming. And I remember it really gut-punched me. And then the news came out about Zero Year, and I knew that one was going to upset people, but it did. And people were like “now he's doing the origin, f**k this guy!” And that period, those few weeks before Zero Year came out and the ending of Death of the Family had happened, and I think we had a one-shot in between, I just was like, panic attacks all the time. And it was just really rough.

And the reason I bring it up is to just say what I learned from it. And the people that really helped me through, James Tynion IV, incredibly helpful to me through that time, but also Greg. I mean, Greg would call and be like, “it's f*****g great story, I love it, I'm proud to be a part of it. Wait till they see Zero Year.” He was such a great friend. Get your friends around you, don't listen to the online stuff. Whether it's legit or it's not legit, if you're in a state where you're really sensitive to that stuff, just pull away from it. Focus on your own life, your own work, get out of your own head. I was gonna get a tattoo that said, “it's just comics” at that time, just for myself, as a way of being like, it's everything to me, I love comics more than anything, and yet, it's also okay, nobody's gonna die, It's just comics. But the other thing is you have to get back up and do something that you love. You have to do something you're proud of. And Zero Year is my favorite story that we did on Batman, that and Last Knight on Earth. I mean, I love the other ones too, but those two, for me, are the ones where our Batman, our version of Batman, is so on display and the sensibilities of our run are so on display, that those things, they mean a lot to me. And to be able to get up and have Greg and everyone be like, “do the story that's bonkers. The next one is even crazier. It will push them even even further. It is pink and green and Riddler bots and superstorms and Batman wrestling a lion and purple gloves and all of it, like, just go for it.”

And that's the thing I'm trying to say, you have to get up from rejection and try harder to be who you want to be in that way. That moment was transformative for me when Zero Year came out. Not because it got good reviews. I mean, I was lucky it did. But because I loved it. I knew I had made something that I loved in spite of the fact that every time I wrote a sentence during that period, I heard a voice in my head being like, “you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck. You're really going to write that? That's awful” and so on. But I did it and that was what made me so proud. So I don't have time to talk the second thing, which is flashbacks, I'll do it next time, the nature of flashbacks and how to use them and the different purposes of them, but I'm gonna jump over and do the paid post. This one will be long, sorry Ty (best assistant), but I love you guys and thanks again!

S

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Hey, guys, it's Scott.

It's Tuesday, April 18th, and forgive me if the sound quality is a little bit different than usual. I'm doing the same thing I did last time and trying to walk my body across Planet Earth a tiny bit before everything contracts into the Zoom contours for this writers room. But the room is going really well. We finished breaking the structure of season one and now we're getting into the episode breaks. So before, we were breaking up the superstructure of the whole thing—this is where Act One ends, this is where Act Two lands, these are the emotional threads. And we card it so it's almost like on digital index cards, and we use these different programs like Miro (or some people use WritersRoom Pro). But essentially, it's like a board of index cards broken down as episodes 1, 2, 3…8. All the major beats, emotionally and plot-wise. And now we're moving into the actual episode breaks. So we do the scene work, we do the scares, we do the dialogue. So this is where it gets really fun and alive, I think. Even beyond being 10,000 feet above it and seeing the superstructure.

But it's Two Question Tuesday, so I thought I'd try and do some fun with you guys and just jump in. But I'm going to do this post how I normally do them we're going to do the first part free, second part paid. I thought for the paid part, I got some questions about the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. So I thought I'd translate that into a small summary of what's going on there. Just a few sentences, because you can really look it up and get a much better articulation of it than I can do. But just a talk about different ways that you can kind of create financial stability for yourself as a comic book writer, different ways that people do it. Not just how do you get a paycheck, but how do you create some level of financial floor or safety net? And it's not easy. And again like, we all struggle with it. But just the different methods that some people have for making those cushions from themselves.

But for the free question

Christian asks, “How do you manage rejections well? Or is that just something that never happens to you anymore?”

Yes, I still get it. I assume what you're talking about if I had a period of rejection where it was like, rejection all the time? The answer is absolutely. I was really lucky in comics. I walked in at a time when I had a background in books. But more importantly, there was a big demand for new voices, there was kind of an exclusive contract battle going over between Marvel and DC over who would get this new writer, that new writer, and so I lucked out and came in at a time when I didn't have a lot of rejection in comics early on. But I did have it in books. I mean, I sent out stories trying to get published between like, 1998 and 2004/05. And I have plenty of rejection letters. They're in a drawer at my parents house, I don't need them in my own house. But I'll take a picture one day and show you so you can see that I'm not f*****g with you. But yeah, I sent things to every kind of magazine back then from the biggest, like The New Yorker, to the smallest, stapled together local literary journals and got rejected by all of them. But literally hundreds of rejections. So I had been there.

And the thing to know is like, it sucks man. It still sucks, but it really sucked back then. But the way you have to think about it is that it sucks because it hurts. And the reason why it hurts is because you're making something you care about, right? It's a good sign for it to hurt, it should hurt. Because what you're writing matters to you. It's something important to you, you're vulnerable to it. And so yeah, it's gonna cause pain when somebody sends it back and says no. So it's a healthy sign. If it didn't hurt, it would mean on some level that you didn't care. You develop a skin over time, hopefully, but it always hurts. If it doesn't hurt on some level, then you're probably doing it wrong.

But I'll tell you one story. So there was one magazine, I won't name it, but it was like a small literary journal in New York, and I really loved it. And it's still around, actually. And I remember I actually sent a story that became the title story in my Voodoo Heart collection to them early on. And I was really hopeful about possibly at least getting a nice rejection letter. And I did, I got this rejection letter. And this is like, the days before email was so prevalent. Back then we would actually send the story printed out in a manila envelope with a self-addressed stamped envelope in it so people could send you your rejection on your own dime back to your house. So it was a different system back then, different methodology. You paid for your own humiliation. But anyway, I sent this in a self-addressed stamped envelope and I got back a really nice, or at least a handwritten, rejection. In the code of rejection letters, this told you that someone read it and took the time to actually hand-write a rejection even if it was the same words as the form letter. And it made my day, I was so excited.

And then two weeks later, I remember showing my friends that I got another letter from the same people, who had paid it themselves to send me their envelope, which they had stamped themselves and found my address somewhere, even though they had already sent me my stuff back. And they had typed the form letter, and it said “in case you missed it.” So I got two rejections. The second one was a form letter being like, “we didn't mean to send you the handwritten one.” And then, no b******t, two weeks after that, maybe three weeks after that, I got a third form letter rejection from them that they had paid for, they had stamped, they had sent all by themselves. So it literally was like, “in case you didn't get the last one that said ‘we didn't mean to send you the handwritten one,’ here's this one.” So I remember showing my friends and them taking me out for a beer because I was so crushed. And I still have that one. It's like my golden three rejection letter framed prize.

But yeah, rejection sucks. But again, at the end of the day, it hurts because you care. Find people that are at the same stage of writing as you. That's the other thing, being around people that are getting rejected the same way you are. It forms camaraderie. You come up together, you stick by each other. Like my post last week, I was saying that sometimes it takes ten years, but just being around each other saying, “listen, I believe in you, you can make it,” helping each other make those things better, sometimes listening to a rejection letter that has critiques, all of it.

It’s an important time, it's formative. And later on, believe me, it helps you get rejected a lot. It really does. It helps you to hopefully learn to both listen, filter things, discover, decide which things are worth taking a heart, which things are not, all of it. So happy rejection days out there!

Now I'm gonna move over into the paid part of the newsletter. And I just want to say thank you. We've seen a big uptick in our subscriptions, both free and paid, the last couple months. I don't know what it is that seems to be motivating you guys, but it makes me so so grateful and happy. So thank you guys, I love the relationship that I've been able to form here with you guys, whether it's the Black Jackett Club where I get to actually read your work and talk to you (and we're going to resume those one on ones really soon, sorry we had to take a couple of weeks off for the writers room and for me to get my sea legs with it) down to the free subscriptions where I can interact with you in the comments. I meet so many of you conventions. It's fantastic. I really love this. So thank you guys so much. For the paid section, like I said, what I thought I'd do is talk a little bit about the WGA strike, and more importantly, how to create financial stability. So we're going to jump over there, do that. Again you can always join, $7/month (or $75/year), you get all the classes that we've done so far, all 15 to 20 archived.

You get access to the class that we're going to do in a couple of weeks live. You get to send me to your books if you pay shipping, once a year, for me to sign whatever you want. You get to meet me at cons before the line starts. So hopefully it's a good deal. I don't know, I love doing it. So again, I can't thank you guys enough!

Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Friday, April 14th and I am making this recording as I'm walking through my neighborhood down to the beach just to move my body across the earth out in the air, in the sunshine, and actually feel things outside of the Phantom Zone of a Zoom room. But it's been an incredible two weeks in the room. We actually broke all of season one of Wytches. So we’re really head-spinning, really excited and proud of the work that was done there. The show is twisted and imaginative and dark and heartfelt and I'm really proud of it. We start breaking episodes probably next week, we might take a little more time on the season, but I really can't say enough good things about the work going on in this room and the people involved. So please, like, follow all of them support all of their projects. They're amazing.

But a couple quick housekeeping things. Thank you for all the kind words on Clear #2! It's out this week from Dark Horse. You haven't picked it up, it's a sci-fi/noir creator-owned book by me and brother Francis Manapul. I’m really proud of it. It imagines a future where everybody connects to the internet neurologically and then skins the world however they want. And it's a murder mystery in this future where the detective always keeps his setting on ‘clear’ and sees the world as it is.

Also Nocterra #13 came out this week. Thank you guys again for all the sweet things you said about it and for picking it up and keeping it going so strong at this point, we really appreciate it. If you're not reading that one, it's a creator-owned by me and Tony Daniel over at Image. It's our big ongoing, and it imagines a darkness covers the earth tomorrow and essentially turns every living creature into a monster called a ‘shade.’ The only way to avoid it is to stay lit, stay in some kind of artificial light, whatever you can manage, anything you can find to avoid becoming one of these horrible things. And it follows a group of truckers that's trying to save the world and bring back the sun. FOC for Issue #14 is this Monday (4/17), so make sure you don’t forget to pre-order your copy before the clock runs out!

I mean, life is good. The other big news that we had this week that I've been kind of dying to talk about is DSTLRY. The announcement of new publishing company by Chip Mosher and David Steinberger, formerly of Comixology.

The whole concept with it is that it's really creator friendly. I mean, the idea is to have a company, a publishing house that's creator-first and also owned by or shared ownership with creators themselves. So for me, it's sort of the natural progression of everything that I've been doing—working solely on licensed stuff in DC, starting to do my own stuff in the 2010s with Wytches and stuff outside of Warner Brothers ownership, then breaking away later in 2020 and being able to start my own imprint from my own work, I own those books with my co creators over Comixology and Dark Horse and Image, and then now actually be a part of a publishing house that has a kind of collective ownership with incredible creators that I love from people that I've worked with. These are people I consider family like James Tynion IV and Jock and Tula Lotay and many others to new people that I really admire and I'm just getting to know like Ram V and Stephanie Phillips.

So for me, being a part of something where creators actually have a share in the company was an incredible idea. Page rates are good, you have the rights to your own projects, you participate in all of that, and it's about making beautiful, really high end prestige books, And it’s also trying some new things in digital collectability also. No NFTs, no crypto stuff, but trying to create a marketplace where there are opportunities for creators to make things in their own ways that feel exciting and new. So I think everyone will find their own comfort level with it, do their own thing, but again, I can't tell you how many exciting ideas have been like, already popping up about projects people are planning on doing within DSTLRY. So it's really something I'm deeply, deeply honored to be a part of, excited to be a part of. And I hope you'll give it a shot! We have some amazing books lined up that we'll be announcing soon. All of us, meaning I have a couple but I also know what James is planning, what Jock is planning, and I can't wait for you guys to see. I think we're gonna roll out some really incredible stuff.

And the thing I wanted to talk about was priorities. Like at this point in my career, people asked me a lot like, “are you going to leave to do TV?” “Are you going to go back to DC?” “Are you gonna go to Marvel?” And there's kind of two driving forces that I kind of try and follow. One is creative freedom, creative excitement. So it's always about being the most exciting writer to yourself. Trying to go to the place is going to challenge you creatively and give you an opportunity to do books that really push you. Work with people that you feel are going to bring you to the next level, whether they're people that you trust because you've worked with them before to brand new people like Hayden Sherman over Wildfire (who I'm going to do more projects over there as well with them)…

…or new people like Valeria Favoccia over at Comixology on By a Thread, which is going incredibly well, coming out later this summer.

So it's a creative endeavor, it’s trying to find places that you'll look at playing it safe, you don't feel like you're playing it stale. You're not just doing the same thing over and over again. And it's always scary. But I'd say like, it's one of the first two rules of the class that I always teach. I always say in class that the first rule is write the comic that you'd like to find and pick up today that would make you happier than any other one to discover. And the second one is always trying to be the most exciting writer yourself. So it's part of that second rule. The other thing is trying to be a part of projects that you think have good effect on comics. Being a part of Comixology, the reason that we signed up there was really because A) you can have some creative ownership over the books with my co-creators, so we'd have control over them, but B) because we really believed in the idea that digital comics and print comics are synergistic and that right now they're held apart in a way that forces them into a competitive space. And I deeply believe that someone needs to crack that code.

While I am incredibly saddened to see that Amazon has reduced Comixology a lot and all that stuff, I'm glad that we were sort of at the tail-end of the books that we're doing there. So I almost feel badly that I'm so lucky, having kind of come in at a time when they were really robust and put up a bunch of projects and was able to basically complete all of them before things restructured. But at the same time, it's really hard because I believe in the whole idea that digital subscriptions and browsability will lead to more print purchases from people. I do it that way, my kids do it that way. We browse everything digitally, whether it's music, streaming shows. But the collectability, going to get a physical thing that you own, for me it comes from the browsability first. And it doesn't mean that you can't have print monthly comics at all, I believe in those hugely, I just think that there should be a better healthier ecosystem, where there's more access to more comics digitally, there's more original comics digitally, and then print becomes a space where you go to get the things that you love and you trust and all that. So that's why we were part of that.

Doing Dark Spaces over at IDW, I wanted to try creatively something that would be wholly non-supernatural stories, stories that were really dramatic and about character, people that are placed under pressure almost like in plays. But also, I believe in having a place like Dark Spaces, which also allows for the publication of books by new and up-and-coming creators under that umbrella, like Good Deeds coming out from my friend Che Grayson, who I think is incredible.

That is a good thing. It's a nice thing to do in comics. And so DSTLRY is similar for me, it's something that I believe in. I believe in the idea that creators having some part-ownership of a company, having creative freedom within that company, partnering with people that are going to allow them a lot of elasticity on their own books, a lot of elasticity on the kind of merchandise they want to sell, have an incentive and success-driven model where if a book is doing well, you share in the profits. All of that, that's good. It's a good space to create and comics. And Chip and David have been wonderful to me, first coming into Comixology and now here, so I believe in them as people and I believe in my fellow creators.

So again, I really hope you'll check it out. I'm incredibly thrilled and thankful to be a part of this thing with so many people I really love and trust and am inspired by. So I hope you'll follow it and go to the site and sign up for the email list. It'll be a while before I have anything coming out there. We'll have big announcements and all that soon. So you understand too, I am fully committed to finishing everything that I have on my plate first. So I've said that to everybody and it's very important to me never to break those kinds of promises. I feel like I've tried to go through my career being as transparent and honest as possible with those things. So here, there's no way that I would start a new book for a company without making sure all the books that I'm working on or closing down or in good shape and ahead, so don't worry about anything you're reading by me that you like. There's a bit of a delay on Book of Evil and a couple of the other things simply because of the writers room and it's taking a little bit more time and energy than I expected. But they're moving along and I promise we'll get them out and get them done soon.

Again, I can't thank you enough for this period of my life. Honestly, you guys are the best fans. I told you going to Chicago and seeing people show up the way they did and bring create our own books. The thing is I do get asked a lot “Are you going to go back to DC?” “Are you going to go to Marvel?” And the truth is, I absolutely would love to. I love DC and I love so much of Marvel as well. But I try and follow those two things I was telling you about, I want to go back when it's creatively really exciting, like there's a spot. I have ideas about when that could be, and what that shape could look like. But it has to be creatively, right. And also, I want to do it when I feel like it's something that I can contribute, where I can contribute something good for comics, do something that would bring people into stores in a way that would make it worth it on a different level as well. So everything's always on the table.

But for right now, being in this spot, getting to work on a show with Jock, have our work and expand it with people I love, making these books that I'm so fond of and I believe are some of the best things I've ever done, having ownership of those books with my friends, and having those books in development and so many different places. Right now we have six or seven books in development at different places like that. It's just living a dream that I owe to you guys. So thank you, again, for everything always. DSTLRY is just one more incredible chapter. And I promise the one thing I can tell you is like, I will never take it for granted. I will try my best to make the best stuff that I can for you as the only way I can say thank you. The only way I can say thank you is to give it 110% and make sure that everything I'm putting out feels like the best thing that I've done, or as good as the best stuff that I've done. So thank you guys again and we'll talk next week!

S

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Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Wednesday, April 12th, and I'm sorry I missed last week doing a post. It's been crazy. We had our first week of the Wytches writers room and it was pretty incredible, honestly. We made way more progress than I thought. We're breaking the first season right now, so we're sort of restructuring things to make sure that the eight-episode season really feels strong. And the people in the room have just come up with so many good ideas and have helped reshape things in a way that I think brings out all of the pathos and heart and, really, horror of the whole series in such a strong way that I'm just extremely excited. But it is exhausting, man. Being in a Zoom room for five to six hours a day and being partially in charge of it, running it and staring into that box, always having to be on, always having to respond, always having to consider everything, move things around on the board, think about every suggestion… I mean, there's no downtime. So last night, for example, I was going to do a post and I completely fell asleep watching The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which is an awesome movie on Netflix, by the way.

But a couple things. Housekeeping first, Clear #2 is out this week. Really hoping you'll check it out, we’re super proud of it. And also Nocterra #13. I'm so, so excited about this book and this arc as well. So I hope you guys will go check those books out in print!

Also, on a personal level, things have been crazy because our 16 year-old, Jack, is on a school trip to Ecuador, which blows my mind. The trips that it seems like kids take these days are unbelievable. I mean, I've never been anywhere near Ecuador, I wish I could go. But they used to take us to like, Randall's Island for a field trip, so I'm sort of baffled and amazed and grateful to see these pictures come in from him. Our 11 year-old is in heaven because baseball season has started. We are big Yankees fans in our house. I've followed him down that rabbit hole, he knows like, every statistic from the beginning of the century to now. He’s obsessed with baseball, wonderfully into it. So Yankees are 7 in 4, doing well. We have partial season tickets, so we’ll be going to a game next week. Quinny is bopping along, today's picture day and he's super excited. He got a haircut yesterday at Rockabilly Barbers, our favorite barber out here. We've been going there for 15 years, since before I broke into comics. And they're amazing if you're anywhere in Suffolk County.

But yeah, I was gonna talk today a little bit about a great question it, Ty can post it here:

nyaliss asks, “Outside of the actual writing, what is the most important, and maybe overlooked, skill a writer should develop?”

And I thought what I’d do is go over a valuable thing to hang on to that you can learn as a writer. I’ll be doing a free part of the post and then a paid part. The free part I’m going to talk about this skill, and then the paid post is a technique that helps with it a bit. So for the free part, I think the thing that honestly is the most important element you can learn beyond craft itself as the writer, and I know that sounds hokey but it's the truth, is persistence. It's an endurance race. I mean, I really believe there’s not like, a million great comics under beds that get rejected by publishers because it's a fickle industry. Instead, it’s that people don't finish things or refine them enough. And there are a million reasons for that. Some are absolutely just circumstantial where life gets in the way. Life is always getting in the way for me too. But there's also all kinds of fears and terrors and anxieties and frustrations that arise in doing it that make it not fun sometimes, or often, to push through things.

But I'll give you two examples. Like, for me, I really believe deeply in teaching because I do believe that writing is one of those skills. And I've said it before, it can be learned to a level of competency. Some jobs, you can't. You're not going to make living as a professional baseball player unless you're exceptional. There are some jobs that to do them professionally, you have to be in that incredible top percent. But for writing, to be able to do it to a level where you're working and you're selling things and you're you're making things you're proud of and self publishing, it's like most careers jobs where I feel like they can be learned to a level of proficiency. It doesn't mean that you're going to be amazing at it, it doesn't mean that you're going to be some legend at it or something like Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman, but it means that you can do it. It’s the same way like, if I wanted to be a lawyer. I think I could probably learn how to be a lawyer. I might not be great at it, but if I loved it and wanted to do it, I could learn to do it. And sometimes you find out you are great at it, or or you can learn to be great at it. So I believe very much, as somebody who doesn't think he started off with a great skill set for writing but wanted to do it, in the ability of people to learn it. So persistence, okay?

I went to grad school for it, I went to Columbia in New York, when I was about 23 or 24. And I had taken a few years off in between college and grad school and I had done odd jobs that I've talked about, like work at Disney World and traveled a bit around the country and that stuff. But I was young, and most of the people I met at grad school were pretty young, we were in our 20s. And everyone came in with things they were working on and a certain level of talent. But there's really varied levels of experience and all of that, and there were a couple of people in the class, I remember, that were older. One, Hillary, was in her late 30s. And another, similarly, James was in his mid-to-late 30s at the time. And Hillary had come up from Texas to New York, and I think she's pretty public about this, but she had been recently divorced and had left a successful career to take a shot at this, at writing. And James was Columbian and was now living in the States.

And I remember, we're all good friends, like I love both of them and that, but our friend groups, they gravitated towards each other as people that were more mature, and we were 10/15 years younger. And me and a friend of mine, Owen King, and a couple other people, we bonded closely. But there was always a sense of “God, they're starting this so late.” And they had other pressures we didn't have. You had financial pressures that we could mitigate by living with roommates and all kinds of stuff that I think at that point in their lives were tougher. And the books they were starting were really challenging. Hillary's was a historical book about a farm in the 1930s and James's was about a town in Colombia where all the men were taken by guerrilla fighters except for one boy, and everybody else were women who took on the jobs of both genders.

And they were ambitious books, they were difficult to write, they were harder than the short story collections and stuff that we were writing, I thought at the time. And there was a sense that this is not going to go well, or this is going to take a very long time for them, because they were skilled and had talent, but again, these books were tough to write. And I think there was a sense on our part that they were older, and the endurance race would get to them whereas we had more fuel in the tank and ability to sacrifice a couple years working on stuff. And it took both of them the better part of ten years. James worked as a waiter and Hillary worked different jobs doing advertising, and everything.

And we've stayed in touch, but again, it took them a decade where they bonded together and traded stuff. Almost ten years. And Hillary Jordan’s book was Mudbound, which is a big Netflix success and was up for a bunch of awards.

And his book, Tales from the Town of Widows, was a pick for one of the groups like Good Morning America and was a best seller as well. And they have thriving careers in writing.

And what I'm trying to say to you is it's not like they started off from some huge deficit with talent. But they started off from a rough point, they came to writing later in life—English was James’ second language and Hillary, again, had a full other life and career before diving in. And there was just a feeling that this was gonna take awhile, and it did take a while. But they stuck with it and they're two of the people that were the most successful out of our group, easily.

And there were people that had tremendous talent. I remember just being like, “God, this person is gonna sell a book in a second.” And some people did. But then some people who also had tremendous talent never finished anything. And it's that ability to get up and write when you don't feel like it. When you have another job, when you have a kid crying, all that stuff, finding the time to do it when you don't feel like it squirreling away that work that will allow you to do it to a level of proficiency and professionalism. Honestly, you can do it as a profession, I'm telling you. It doesn't mean that you might be you might need another job most people do. It doesn't mean that you're gonna live on the earnings of it forever or anything like that. But you can do it to a level where you are making things and you are selling them yourself and all that stuff. Like if that's what you want to do, you can do it. And again, maybe you'll find yourself in a position where you are able to make a living and you are tremendously successful with it. But it's all to me about dedication and that persistence. It's about learning the craft, enjoying learning the craft, and then thinking of it as your real job no matter what else you're doing in life—thinking of it as your real, real job.

Okay, so now I'm gonna move over to the paid part of the post and give you a strategy for keeping your eye on the ball when it comes to first things that you're writing. And even if you're an expert and you're working on stuff, it might be a good rule or thing to remember, a craft technique. Thanks!

Hey, guys, it's Scott. It is Tuesday, April 4th, and forgive the sort of hungover, worn-out sound of my voice. It's been a long three days, but a great three days. I'm just tired, I'm not hungover, I swear. Also forgive the sound, I accidentally left my phone in Chicago at this convention, or in the car on the way to the plane, and didn't realize it until I stepped out of the car and was listening to music and then suddenly it died in my AirPods and then it was too late and I couldn't get it back by the time I had to go through the gate, so I'm using my 11 year old Emmett’s phone to do this. He’s angrily waiting for me to hand it back to him because he's on spring break right here. So a bit of a mess.

But it was a fantastic time in Chicago. It was honestly one of the best convention experiences I've had in awhile. It was so packed, first of all, which was a shock. But the energy there was off the charts. I didn't expect it to be just so so full. But I think it's sold out both days. I'm not sure, I mean, I can't imagine many more people in there. But I've done a lot of spotlight panels over the years and things like that, where it's just me speaking, and I've never had to like turn people away before because it was full, or not that I remember. So that's no testament to like me being any better than I've ever been or whatever, it's just great to see a con so full of fans in general.

Everybody had a line. It was really nice to look down on the row of friends and creators like Kyle Higgins and Sean Murphy and Charles Soule and Alex Paknadel and just down the road. And Tony obviously was with me all weekend, which was great. But just to see everybody have a line, it was just healthy and fun and there was some awesome cosplay, which I’ll have Ty post here, and people who were just joyous and excited to be back there.

There was a DJ, but I wish more people danced. I will say that Jedis are the only ones that get up there and dance a lot of the time with their lightsabers. So we have to get up there and all other neighborhoods of geekdom need to challenge them, whether you're a DnD player, whether you're anime or comics or whatever, we need to find our groove and get up there and dance alongside the Jedi and Sith.

But it was great, I really got a chance to catch up with friends. I mean, again, the priorities of the convention for me and for most pros, honestly, are like, there's the work aspect, obviously, where you're signing and you're hoping to bring something home to your family. But it's also about connecting with fans and getting a chance above all to say thank you to you guys for supporting us and giving us this incredible job.

And this con was just off the charts in terms of people coming up and saying personal things, a shout out to both Carson and Sarah (you know who you are) for your stories, and just coming up and telling you that your work meant something to them. And sometimes people will say, “well, I'm sure you hear this…” That does not get old to hear that your work affected somebody in some way. So thank you to everybody that came this weekend and said those things and filled those lines. I mean, it was just an incredible experience.

But I also got to catch up with friends, which is really nice. I caught up with Sean Murphy, who I hadn't seen in a long time. I heard all about his amazing Zorro project, which is going to be incredible.

I caught up with Tony Daniel, who's just become one of my best friends, and it was a ton of fun to talk to and plan with and hear about projects he's scheming on and tell him about my projects. Charles Soule, we planned the next two arcs of Undiscovered Country and we went out to dinner, we got away from the con.

You know, it's funny, we used to be at the con bar and there used to be this whole Bar Con culture and that stuff to varying degrees. But these days, I don't know if it's just that we're older, I don't know if there's less of a presence in comics at these conventions, like it used to be they'd send a lot of editors and now they don't have a lot of editors. And on top of that, they don't really go to the cons as much, like DC/Marvel, they don't really have as big a presence as they used to. But it's mostly just fans there. And we don't want to impose and it's an odd situation, so we avoid that altogether and just kind of go out to dinner and explore Chicago. We've been doing a bunch of cons lately and it’s just kind of getting away. That's been great. So it was just nice to see so many fans there. But we kind of did our own thing and got to see a little bit of the city and go to some good restaurants based on Tony's amazing wife's recommendation, and it was a blast. I can't say enough good things about it. I'm really excited except that I lost my phone on the way back, and here we are.

A tiny bit of housekeeping, I should have said first, but again I'm functioning on half my brain cells—Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder. The final issue is out today. Really, really proud of this book. I can't thank Tula Lotay enough for being an amazing partner on this whole thing.

It's a historical fiction, it's about class, it's about this moment reflected in that moment, it's about desperation and hope and all these things that were encapsulated for me in that era of barnstorming—of taking a war machine plane and turning it into this crazy daredevil thing you did for yourself, and when two people trust each other enough to get out on the wings of a plane up there there's a special kind of bravery there on all kinds of levels. So anyway, I'm really, really proud of it. I hope you guys enjoy it.

And we have Nocterra #13 coming out next week.

I really hope you'll check that out. Again, this arc is off the chain, I can't say enough fun things about it, we have a bunch of crazy s**t happening in there.

And then other than that, like, housekeeping aside, we're in the writers room. So the writers room started yesterday. I can't wrap my head around, and I'm so excited. I tweeted out a couple of names you might want to follow, incredible writers from all different walks of the creative landscape. We have a playwright, we have someone who's made her own film and is an expert writer, but also has worked in animation and production, we have someone who's worked on incredible dramas like Better Call Saul, we have someone that's also worked in some of the best horror on television like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. So it's just amazing. And the producer, Kevin Kolde, who has been with us from the start and has done some of the best animation on television for the last like two decades. So I'm just so excited about it.

And it's an amazing feeling, honestly. It's scary. It's really scary going into a room like that and then having something that you've been working on and care about so deeply being exposed and open to so many different voices. But what I'd say to you is like, if you're interested in comics in general, but also TV and film, that’s sort of the key. If you're reading novels, it's different. It's just you and you have an editor. But when you're doing TV, comics, any of it, it really is you and a team. It's you and other people, and you have to be able to give this thing that feels like a child to someone else to take care of and help raise. But to sit there yesterday and hear these incredible suggestions about how to make it scary, how to make Sailor’s are more emotional, new plot twists, all of it was just such a thrill. All my hopes were definitely met with it, and I can't wait to get in there today. We’re in there every day from like, 9am PST/12pm EST (where I live) to like, 2:30 PST/5-5:30 EST. So it is like a job like, five days a week. So it's a lot, but I'm really, really excited about it and I think we're going to make you something very special.

I'll do one question because I've taken up way too much time talking about everything. But the question I got was:

jeclark1126 asks, “what do you do to overcome writer’s block?”

You know, most of us in comics and stuff, I think they'll probably have the same answer for you, which is that writer's block, it is a thing. I get it too where I think how do I solve this thing? But it's different. If writer's block is your inability to kind of push through a knot in something that you're writing, a lot of the time the way around it is to call friends. I call friends to tell them ideas. I talked to James Tynion IV for years, like, almost every day when we were on Batman and all that stuff. I still talk to him all the time about story. And now I have Will Dennis, who edits all of our stuff. That's my methodology. I love talking things through. I talk to Tyler (thanks, Ty). That's the way I work through things. But above all, the thing to do is to put the pages down by the time your deadline hits.

So the bigger suggestion beyond if it works for you to go for a run and get some exercise, if it works for you to talk to somebody, if it works for you to see something or watch something or read something similar, whatever it is that’s gonna get your motor going, the thing is, you then have to set a deadline for yourself and say “I'm writing these pages by this time.” They might be horrible and suck, but I need it done. That's the way out of writer's block, honestly, because that's what happens in real life. So you have to train yourself to be able to be like, I know, I don't know the answer, but I'm gonna write through it anyway, I'm gonna try something and it might not work, but I'm gonna have it. Because again, to me ultimately, writer's block is sort of the fear of writing something shitty. And it can be really paralyzing. It's like when you don't know which is the right way to go, you're not sure how to approach it, and it absolutely can stop you in your tracks for a long time.

But the whole idea is, if you get used to saying “I'm writing through it anyway,” physically sitting there and writing, even when I know that something isn't going to be good( and often it isn't), sometimes you'll surprise yourself and write your favorite thing in those moments. You'll beat it because eventually what will happen is you'll get more and more used to sitting and writing when you don’t feel like it. And you'll learn your own tics, you'll learn your own ways through some of the creative clouds that you're in, you'll learn what sorts of ideas come up in those periods for you, what sort of ones elude you, you'll get better at the whole process. But the key is engaging, like engaging with writing by a deadline.

So if there's something you need to do to get inspiration, read something, exercise, talk to someone, whatever it is, great. But set a deadline for yourself, and by the time this time hits like, one day from now, two days from now, whatever it is, I will be through this scene or I will be through this number of pages, and just stick to it. And that's it, it really is. Like, most of us just joke like we can't have writer's block because we have deadlines, you just can't have it. And if you want to be a writer, it's the best way to train yourself. I told you, the best thing out of grad school for me, other than making friends that were writers and making some connections, I mean, really the biggest thing of all for me it was learning to write every day, learning to write under duress, learning to write you don't feel like it, basically learning to write for deadline. So that's it, just make a deadline and push it. I know it sucks, but it's just the truth.

Alright, guys, wish me luck in the writers room. I'm sorry we can't do the regularly scheduled one on ones for the next few weeks. The first week of the writers room is just pretty intense and I want to make sure I give it all my attention. And yeah, I'll be back on Friday, and Friday’s post will have a component that's free and have a component that's for paid subscribers. We saw a big uptick in paid subscribers the last couple of weeks, we really appreciate it. Again, please, if you get a chance, we're really proud of all the things that we're offering in that tier, like the class (which is completely archive, so you can watch or listen to all of them if you want all 16 or 17 at this point).

Also, a lot of people took advantage this weekend of getting to skip the massive lines at C2E2 by having a subscription. And also, you get to send in two books a year for me to sign for free (with just shipping for you), any books of your choice. So along with other things, those are some of the perks. I hope you'll sign up and thank you guys so much for everything. I'm really I owe all this to you. That’s the point of the con, I was sitting there just thinking to myself like, I can't believe you guys have stuck with me this long, but I promise my side of the bargain is to just try my best to put up the best stuff I always can, and I might fail, but it won't be for lack of trying. I promise. I feel like owe you everything, and I'll put everything I have into everything I do. Thank you!

S

P.S. Thanks to Brian K. Vaughan for giving the Comic Writing 102 class a shout-out on his own killer Substack, Exploding Giraffe, where he gives awesome insights on his own career, releases great original content, and has plenty of great giveaways. Throw a subscription their way if you haven’t already:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bestjackettpress.substack.com/subscribe

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Hey guys, it's Scott.

It’s Wednesday, March 29th. I can't believe it's almost the end of the month and I am functioning on like, two hours of sleep two nights in a row because Quinny has a raging ear infection. The craniotomy he had when he was six months old makes him more susceptible to these kinds of infections and he is not a well dude right now, I feel terrible for him. He's like, wandering around and he has fluid in his ear, so he's like, “what? What Dad? What?” But he's in good spirits. Anyway, I'm very excited about C2E2 this weekend. It’s the first domestic con I've done in like, six months, so I'm really, really thrilled to get out there and say hi to you guys. I can't wait. I have some good friends going—Kyle Higgins, Sean Murphy, of course Tony Daniel (who I can't wait to see and I'm hanging out with a lot), Brian Azzarello, and Charles Soule. So there's a bunch of people that I'm really excited to see. Come by, I really hope you'll come say hi, at least.

Remember, if you are a paid subscriber ($7/month or $75/year), you get to come at the very first 10 minutes of every signing. I have a section that's really just for subscribers, you get to come up early and get your stuff signed without waiting on line. Like I said, I have not been to a domestic con in six months, I've not been to C2E2 since the pre-pandemic days, so the lines are likely to be long, sometimes they're a couple hours. So you can still do it, you can join the paid tier now, get your name on an email list, and then wind up having your own space before the signing actually opens and getting your stuff signed without having to stand there for a very long time.

You also will get a 30% discount on the VIP night, that event that me and Tony Daniel from Nocterra are doing Saturday night. It's going to be really fun, we have giveaways, you meet us, get stuff signed, you get pictures with us, all kinds of stuff. So you get to hang, it'll be great. If you're a Black Jackett member, that's free for you, so just come by. Also, I'm going to try and set something up on Saturday before the VIP event where you can come say hello, I'll see if I can just hang out at the hotel lobby bar, that kind of thing, and just be there in case you guys want to come up and say hello and chat comics or any that kind of stuff. I'm trying to make myself available. Honestly, the highlights of the last few months have been getting to know you guys, meet you in the Black Jackett one-on-ones, see you at cons, all that kind of stuff. So I'd like to make more time for it. So I'm really hoping you'll come by and say hi in Chicago, so do!

Also, the Wytches writers room starts on Monday, I can't believe it! I'm going to announce who’s in it really soon. I thought I'd do it today. B, but I just don't want to jump the gun and cause any kind of Twitter blowback. But we have amazing people. I have a great co showrunner, we have a fantastic upper level writer, and then we have two more people also joining the room that will announce once everything starts. But yes, Monday, wish me luck. So I'm going to Yankees opening day on Thursday, Friday is when I'm flying to Chicago at 5:30 in the morning, I’m doing the con Saturday/Sunday, I fly back Sunday night, and then the room starts Monday. So hopefully I will be here Tuesday to report back and I'm not a skeleton somewhere.

But okay, so it's Tuesday, so two questions. And the way that I'm gonna do this post is going back to the format that we used to use. I'm going to keep this one up. I kind of just started talking too much and forgetting to do the paid part of the posts, but from now on we're going to have the free part and the part for paid subscribers that’s going to be really fun. It's all about favorite characters and how they're introduced and looking at their introductions. So this part I thought I'd answer to your questions. The first question is:

HobGadling asks, “I’m wondering what your basic tenets are for researching stories? In other words, what do you research first?”

So I've answered this question in one form, so I thought I'd change it because one of the other versions of this question that I got was, when I'm doing research, is it helpful for me to read things like my own, like, what I'm going for? Like, if I'm going to do Clear, do I want to rewatch Blade Runner? Do I want to watch Looper? Do I want to see The Matrix and all the stuff that influences that book like The Big Sleep and all that kind of stuff? Do I want to look at that? Absolutely. I mean, some people don't. For me, I like to take it all in and absorb it because it also reminds me of the things I love about each of those works, and I take inspiration from them, but it also makes me very sort of clear on what I'm going to avoid and how to distill all of it into something that's my own.

So for Clear, for example, I did watch all that stuff. And it was very important to me to create a visual palette that didn't feel like anything like The Matrix, didn't feel like Blade Runner either, didn't feel overwhelming with the things that you see. Instead it felt very dull until you're inside the veils of other people's visions. So you can see the world the way they see it. And then suddenly, it's this kind of kaleidoscopic field. Similarly, looking at the story from something like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, wanting to invert some of those tropes so that there isn't just a dead body that's a woman that winds up being the catalyst for the case, but instead, the dead body at the beginning (without spoiling too much of our story) turns out to be the body of a character who's still alive and winds up playing a major role in the story. Also, the woman who seems like the femme fatale takes on another role.

All of it isn't to subvert those just to subvert them. It's because the story is about subverting expectations. Visually, it's about how hidden the truth is. It's about not falling into patterns that make things easy for us. So all of that is part of it. So revisiting all the things that influence that is a really good form of research for me, and I would encourage it. That said, if it makes you worried you're going to write too much like something else you need to be in a black box, go for it, whatever works for you in your own process.

Second question, we got a lot of things about the new relaunches going on at Marvel and DC, so many of which I'm excited for—Tom King on Wonder Woman, Philip Kennedy Johnson on Hulk, Si Spurrier on Flash, just cool stuff up and down the line.

So I'm really excited. I love when the companies refresh things a bit. I love when it's tied to an incentive, also, and it's like, look, we're doing this across the line at a certain point, especially when it's tied together. My favorite versions are when it's tied to a story reason to do it, like an event or an initiative like Rebirth. So it gives a kind of an impetus and a line wide narrative that's going through. My second favorite version is when they just do a kind of All New, All Different where it’s like, you just create an initiative that affords room for new teams to come in and do things. The third favorite, which is not really something I love is like, rebooting and that stuff. But the idea that you can refresh things in a big and comprehensive way is, to me, the lifeblood of comics and exciting. You honor what came before, you try and do things that are new and daring, all of it at the same time. It doesn't need to be either or, it doesn't need to be “reboot or go back to classic,” it can be both at the same time. That's my belief. That’s Death Metal was about and it's kind of the priorities that I would bring back superheroes (if I ever work in them again).

But passing the torch. Passing the torch, to me, the best example of it ever was what Grant did for me. Grant was very welcoming, as I've said many times, and I've talked about meeting them at cons, but I'll tell you a story I haven't told, which is the New York Comic Con, maybe the second year I was on Batman, when the sales of Batman began to really take off and were surpassing Batman Inc.—not that it was more important than Batman Inc. or better than Batman Inc. in any capacity, Grant’s run will always be my favorite one, more than my own or any of that stuff. But Batman will always be the lead book of the Bat-universe. You know, if I do All-Star and All-Star outsells Batman for a month, it will always sink to Batman. Batman Inc, same thing, Batman will take over in this environment post-2010 or whatever when they started really investing in Batman as a flagship book. Before that, I think Batman could sell lower and other books could overtake it, but right now it's boosted in such a way that it will always command the attention. And that could change structurally, definitely, but that's kind of where it is.

So Grant in New York, some people would be angry, like who was I? I was nobody. The sales were doing well, they were rivaling Batman Inc., and then my parents went up to Grant after a panel to just tell them how much I was a fan of theirs. And they pulled them aside and talk to them for like 5 to 10 minutes and told them all the reasons they thought I was a promising writer and why they should be proud of me. And I'm telling you, there's no political gain in that. Like, you're not talking to an editor and acting like a good company person. You're doing it out of kindness. And I've always remembered that. It's one more story why I think Grant’s amazing. My parents tell that story all the time. And I just also love the image of my parents talking to Grant Morrison, who's wearing like, a shirt that says “EVIL,” and like, a suit over it and that stuff.

But anyway, there are three priorities, I think, to passing the torch, and I've tried hard to live by them. And one of them, I think, is just reaching out to the person coming after you and making sure they feel welcome. I tried to do that with Charles Soule, I definitely tried to do that with Tom King, too.

Also, the second thing apart from just as a human being, like, welcoming them to the community, is trying to put the pieces in a position that sets them up the way they want to be set up. For me, on Batman, we got to do everything we wanted to do—push the limits as far as I could with my own skills, I have my own limitations, but that was the farthest that I could do. Having Batman die and be brought back, having him live as not Batman, having Commissioner Gordon be Batman, having Joker pretend to be someone immortal, all of that stuff. I got to do everything. And so now it was time to put the pieces back. And so a lot of the time you do want to leave a couple things changed so it doesn't feel like everything's going back in the box. In that case I did try to put everything back in the box. But you talk to the writer after, you say “what pieces do you want in what formation?” and see if you can set that up. Batman, for me, when Tom came on, was really just about putting everything back for Rebirth. So that's what we did. We undid everything. It wasn't like Batman was gone. It wasn't like villains were off the table, any of that stuff.

Thirdly, being supportive of that person as they go. Because the idea is it's the same thing as teaching. If you can be supportive of the person that comes after you and give them the tools they want and to make something that's their own, there's no competition because they're gonna make something that's so wildly different than what you did that they’re apples and oranges. Like, Grant’s run is completely different than anything that became before, my run is completely different than Grant’s., Tom's run is totally different than mine in all aspects, James is wildly different than Tom's, completely sort of inverts some of the sensibility of Tom's, and then Chip’s is really different than James's. Josh’s was also fantastic.

The whole fun of like, coming in and getting to do something that is your own allows you to stand aside from the people that did stuff before you. So supporting someone in the chance to do that is key, because then they'll make something that isn't competitive with you. And to be fair, you're gonna have bad moments, like we all had our moments when you worry, and you let things get the best of you and you feel like, oh, my God, are they overtaking what I did? Everyone has those feelings, but you do your best to really stay true to the idea that you did your thing and you're proud of it, and they're going to do something that's theirs, and people can love both things equally, or theirs more, yours more, and that's okay.

I will say that I know more than a few writers who had a lot of trouble letting go of the character they were on. Admittedly, it's hard, you're with that character emotionally for years and you live in their shoes for years and years and years, and then to give them to someone else. I forget who said it, but they said it was “like watching somebody else date your ex,” or something. But I think when you do that, when you hold pieces away, or you set them up for failure, or you try to compete with them in another area as opposed to doing things parallel and giving them space—for me, it was important to take Batman out of Gotham, make sure Tom had space in Gotham. But you're always going to have things that crash into each other, you're always going to have moments when you might not agree on the direction of a character, any of that stuff, and you try your best to work it out. But the point is, the more you try and cling to the character in that stuff, the more you are going to wind up in a competitive negative space with the person after you, so torch-passing is hard. I think we all do our best. But yeah, the more you can support the person after you give them the pieces they need and welcome them to the family, the better off everyone's going to be.

Okay guys, see you at C2E2! Now I'm going to do the paid part of the post. So again, feel free to sign up, it's not too late, that seven bucks will get you a lot of benefits, both with the archive of the class, sending your books in to get signed, and if you're in Chicago. Thanks, guys. Again, to $7 a month and you'll hop over to this side and there’s tons of benefits, I hope you'll do it. But no pressure. I'm just happy to have you here as part of Our Best Jackett and can't thank you enough!

Hey guys, it's Scott.

It is Monday, March 13th, and I wanted to do a quick post because I didn't get a chance to do one on Friday. Jeanie, my wife, is away at SXSW with her very good friend (who's our neighbor) and their kid who’s really interested in film. So I got to go away with our 16 year-old, as you know, to Colorado a couple weeks ago and so I thought it would be fun for her to take a trip for a couple days and go explore Austin. So as you can imagine though, it’s a lot of like, dadding with a lot of ordering chicken wings and McDonald's and whatever over here and scrambling to do homework and all of that. So yeah, I didn't get a chance to do one on Friday, so I apologize. I wanted to do a very quick one today and just talk about a couple of things.

First, housekeeping stuff. Today is the Final Order Cutoff (FOC) for Clear #2.

The first issue seems close to selling out. We're really excited. Thank you everybody out there—retailers, fans, reviewers, everyone that gave it such an incredibly warm reception. Francis and I are over the moon. And again, we're like, right in the middle of talks right now for the ancillary rights for film and TV, we're really excited. But seeing the comic reception really was the best part of last week, so thank you guys so much. But today's the last day to order the second issue. It's a three-issue first arc, they're all oversized, like, 50 to 60 pages long, so order from Dark Horse today from your retailer.

Also, Wednesday, in two days, Nocterra is back! The order numbers on that were really strong. We're incredibly grateful to you guys. So we expect it to have a big presence in the comic book stores. But this is the first issue of our third arc, I hope you'll go check it out.

I'm so so happy with how this is coming out. And this is going to be kind of a big ultimate arc. It brings everything together and it's almost like the culmination of the whole first cycle of the series. So everything is going to change after this arc. So we're very excited to see what you guys think. It's dark and twisted and fun.

Which brings me to the thing that I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about today. Tomorrow, I'll answer a couple of your questions, but seeing the DC announcements last week, and I'm still in conversation with with everybody at DC pretty often and I talked to them about going back and doing stuff sometimes. And there's a lot of things that I still would love to do and it's certainly like a really wonderful place for me creatively and I enjoy it and I think they've fantastic stuff going on now. So I knew about a bunch of the stuff coming, but getting more of the details on what it is, like some of the books that excite me the most was really thrilling because it sounds like they're just having fun. One of the things that I think so many of us can forget sometimes, comics can just be fun. And that can take a couple of different forms. I want to just be a little bit more specific and dig into it because it made me think about the way that I like to write Batman and the way that I enjoyed writing Superman and Justice League and Metal. And I think there's the fun of it just being jubilant and funny and having levity and bombast and all of that. And I love that stuff.

Comixology is constantly like, recommending my own stuff to me, weirdly. And on a whim, because I haven't read it in a while and because I've been working so heavily with Rafael Albuquerque lately on our Duck n’ Cover book for Comixology, which is really coming out great, we're working on the second of the four big issues of our first arc now, I took a look at our First Ally arc in All-Star Batman, back at the end of my time doing Batman stuff before we ramped back up to Metal. So it was like, the last part of the All-Star Batman run that I did. And it's really about Alfred and Alfred's past (it was before the Pennyworth show or any of that stuff), so it was a lot of fun because it was totally unexplored territory.

Essentially, Alfred stays as a spy and all of this stuff, but it opens with this whole sequence that I had completely forgotten about where Batman is chasing Hush, and the whole idea was if Batman is not in Gotham in the series, he's everywhere but (to give Tom King room to do Batman stories in Gotham). But he's in Miami, he's chasing Hush, who’s in a helicopter, and the helicopter flies over a baseball stadium to escape, and in the baseball stadium the Gotham Knights are here in Miami playing the Miami Marlins. And both teams have been knocked out of the playoff contention, so it's a really depressing day there, even though it's Bat Day where they give away bats. And so the whole fun of the sequences the they're singing the national anthem and everybody's depressed and all of a sudden Batman like, decides to drive straight through the stadium to eject and catch Hush over the stadium. And Alfred is narrating about how his son always had a flair for the theatrical and how he thinks he got it from him. He likes to think he got it from him because Alfred was a thespian back in the day. But now Alfred realizes that it's a flair that's all his own. And the whole sequence was like, God I had fun on that book. Reading it, just coming up with things that would show how awesome Batman was and how fun the mythology could be and all of it, it was just a joy.

And I think that those are my best memories of being a DC, or doing that on Court of Owls when he comes out in the big suit and he's like, “get the hell out of my house.”

Or in Zero Year (all of Zero Year’s that kind of out of control stuff) and even Endgame. And so one of the things is as your writing comics, all you aspiring creators out there, whether you're doing indie stuff, whether you're doing DC/Marvel stuff, don't be shy about having fun. The exception is if it doesn't fit the book and obviously if it's artificial, sure, but I'm saying levity—even in Wytches right now, in the writers room, there's a scene, it's one of my favorite scenes, in the second episode where Sailor is discovering the truth about wytches and it's a really funny sequence where she and her friend wind up in a basement where all this information is about wytches. And when they go down, there's pigs in the basement because they were being fed to wytches, and they trigger this system that douses the pigs in this stuff that, because the pigs have been treated to be fed to the wytches, makes them dissolve and burst. And Sailor and her friend think that they're being dissolved by acid and they're in a serial killer basement, but they're not. And the whole thing is just ridiculous, but one of my favorite things, and it's it's twisted and gross but it's funny.

And I'm just saying like, it's okay, if it fits your story, to allow yourself to just have fun and go bonkers. And that's part of the DNA of comics. That's Kirby Krackle, man. Again, one of my favorite lines in Death Metal is when Wonder Woman explains the plan to Batman and he's like, “well that's either a plan or you're having a stroke,” because it's like, “we're gonna get the Death Metal and fire it through the heart of the universe and do this and that.” That's comics.

But also like, to take a slightly different tack, fun can also be just leaning into the priorities of your book and going to the maximum. So fun is also, on Wytches, that opening sequence to me that's incredibly dark where this kid is playing, his mom suddenly appears in a hollow of a tree. She's trapped in a tree behind him and she begs him to go get a rock and help her because she's been pledged and break the tree open. And he gets it and then he bashes her in the head and says “pledged is pledged.”

There's nothing fun about that scene in a traditional sense, but it was fun for me because it embraced the priorities of the book and leaned in and pushed very hard at the limit of what I thought the book should be. It was very pure. It's a horror book that's going to show you the darkness between parents and children that's going to show you all the stuff beneath the surface you don't want to look at. And so it needs that extreme opening that touches on all those ideas and themes.

The same thing with Clear. Clear, in the first issue, has Dunes injected with a drug that essentially forces him to see multiple filters every second so that A) Francis can draw eight hundred different crazy filters he's seeing the world through, and B) we could just have the story take this insane turn, and it felt perfect for that book.

It's not a huge, important part of that sequence narratively, but it's also like, showing you the extreme of what the book can be visually, storywise, everything. It's embracing the priorities and the sensibility of the book. So it's not just like, funny fun. It's fun in the way that it's using the high concepts, the characters, all of it, to the maximum. It’s thinking of the best way that you can embrace all of the things, the DNA of your book, and just go to the extreme with it instead of hedging your bets and playing it quiet. It doesn't mean that a quiet book can’t do the same thing. You can completely lean into the priorities and have fun on something that doesn't have that level of insanity. I'm just saying that fun, to me, is about embracing what your book is and then pushing that to the maximum in some way.

So anyway, again, thank you guys so much for the strength on Clear and Nocterra and everything, and also, we're going to do a class next week. So we're having material this week for the class which is a week from Thursday. So maybe tomorrow we'll put it up, but we'll put it up soon, so I’m really excited about it! We'll have a blast. And yeah, that's it. Thank you guys so much again!

S

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bestjackettpress.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, guys, it's Scott.

It is Tuesday, March 7th, I can't believe the month is going this fast. I say that every time, but I feel like the Earth is just spinning faster and faster every day. Anyway, a couple quick housekeeping things before I dive into your questions. Tomorrow, Wednesday the 8th, out from Dark Horse Comics, is Clear #1. It's an oversized massive issue, it's the beginning of a sci-fi noir series that I did with co-creator and great friend Francis Manapul. It's about a future where we all connect to the internet neurologically and can ‘skin’ the world however we want, and it's a murder mystery that happens in this world that goes from like the back alleys all the way up to the heights of power. And it's a lot of fun, but it's also personal to us and I'm very proud of it. And full disclosure, we're at the tail end of our talks for the ancillary rights, for the film and TV rights right now. It's looking really good. We've had some fantastic conversations and there's just a lot of people that seem interested. So hopefully we'll have good news sometime in the near future about that too.

And also the FOC for issue #2 is Monday!

Then next week, a week from tomorrow, March 15th, Nocterra #12 is out from Image Comics. It's the beginning of our third arc. It's an easy jumping on point, if you haven't been reading Nocterra, it's about a darkness that covers the earth and changes every living thing into a monster. The only way to stop that is to stay lit. Anyway, I'm very, very excited about that one, too. This is easily our biggest and craziest arc and then we've got some really cool guest artists coming for fill in. I hope you'll check it out!

So I meant to do a part two to the post the other day…

…and then I had a kid home sick. He is fine, but he just had a cold. Not long ago, we went to a baseball card convention at a hotel near here. It was awesome. Emmett, who's eleven, is obsessed with baseball and he's the kind of kid that like, consumes a topic over the course of a few years. It was Star Wars and Pokémon and space and Cuphead and Zelda and all this stuff different times. But baseball has really lasted a few years, and it's a great one because it's social and it's active and all those things I've said to you before, and I filled you in on this whole love of his.

But we did not know that there are baseball card conventions nearby, and we went to one at a Holiday Inn not too far with the parents of one of our older boy Jack’s friends who's really into it and has an amazing card collection. And it was so cool. It was just like a comic book convention, but entirely baseball card and football card and basketball card-oriented. Really cool to see Emmett make friends with kids his own age that like baseball cards. It was really endearing and brought a tear to my eye. But the downside was it you could tell the minute you walked in that you're gonna get really sick from it because everybody's handing stuff back and forth, nobody was wearing masks, and it's cold season. So you knew it was coming. But anyway, it was worth it. He has some amazing new cards, and I hope to go to another one!

But your questions, let's answer them.

melissamars asks, “Would you tell us more about your process of 'staging' your story? How do you decide and know how many panels you want for each page? Do you and the artist discuss that together according to the dialogue?"

That's a great question. So staging, in case you don't know, is kind of the choreography. It's like, how you move through a scene, how the angles of the camera work, how fast you're going, what information is given visually, and what information is not. I really try and generally leave that up to the artist. What I do is I talk to them either on the phone beforehand, some artists love to chat before, and I really love that, or if they're really wanted in the script then what I do, and I do it anyway, even if after we chat, is to, at the beginning of each scene, give them a sense of what is trying to be accomplished in the scene. So for example, if I have a scene between Batman and Alfred and the point of the scene is for Alfred to really hint to Bruce that he thinks he's going too far in this case and becoming obsessed and missing some clues, I'll say that and I'll say:

So the feeling should be Alfred trying to figure a way out to get through to Bruce that he's pushing himself too hard and probably missing obvious clues that would help him solve it because he's too obsessed with moving fast and getting the Joker before anything else happens.

So what that would mean is that would dictate some of the visual decisions the artists makes like, I think, seeing Batman from afar, looking close at Alfred, feeling like you're on the outside of Batman’s fear emotionally by being next to Alfred, or seeing Alfred looming in the background sadly.

All those kinds of decisions are based on what that scene is about. So that's kind of the way that I do it. I have a conversation with them on the phone about what a scene is about. They can pitch me ideas like “you know what, what if we never show Batman’s face in that scene? What if he always has his back to us?” I’ll say, “I love it. I think that's a great idea. Let's do it!” Or “what if I frame it in such a way that they're never in the same panel? It's always divided, so visually, we get a sense throughout the page that everybody's in their own box—Alfred, Batman, Alfred, Batman, Alfred, Batman, so they're never together.” “Great idea. Let's go for it!” So that. Again like, being transparent about the priorities of the scene, what the scene is about, is really the key to good staging with an artist.

Okay, second question:

KENHAZLETT asks, “What differences (if any) did you notice about how the different Disney parks approach storytelling? What about storytelling in the Parks, both attractions and character interactions, can we bring to comics writing?”

That is a great question. That is one I want to revisit many times because I had so many experiences working at Disney World that I would love to talk about in relation to storytelling in comics and everything from like funny anecdotes about like, reading Guns & Ammo with Tinkerbell in the tunnels to bigger ideas about the way that they tell their corporate story and they tell their stories internally to guests in good ways. So that's like, a whole giant rabbit hole to go down.

What I would say as like, an opening salvo, I think, about the way that Disney approaches story is that they're completely immersive, for better or worse. They're funny immersive in the kind of way that they approach the parks so that once you enter that park, there is nothing you see that pierces the veil of that story, the way that they asked you as a character, or cast member, to act as a character. There's no off-script. So the goal, and especially with the rides, when you go on a ride there, the queue itself, the line, I forget the term that the Imagineers came up with, but there's a term for it (someone pot it in the comments here) that’s about the story of the ride itself that's being told in that line. So even the lines, everything is reinforcing the idea that you're in a place that's magical. You're in a place that is really unflinchingly about these narratives that you're being told each ride, and that it's meant to make you feel transported to a place that feels fully realized. And I love that about the parks.

I mean, I think it's a priority that you can absolutely bring to your storytelling in comics. How do you create an immersive environment? How do you create something that feels from every angle, from every vantage point, like it's reinforcing the idea that this story is fully realized, full hearted, fully visually imagined. Everything about it is transporting you. That doesn't mean escapist. That doesn't mean like, it's taking you to a place where you're outside of meaning in some way. It just means that the story itself is encompassing you in a way with its own meanings, and its own messaging, and all of it in such a way that you're completely swept up in it, that you're not distracted, that you don't see something outside of it that it feels like everything is fully experiential with it. So I think that's a huge priority to take, and that's a great thing to take from Disney parks to your own work. Make them feel like they're walking into something that has an entire giant tree of story from the moment they step into it. Everywhere they look, there's more story and that story is folding in on itself as a way of showing you that it's a fully imagined world.

Anyway, there's a lot more to talk about there. I must have told the story about the time when I auditioned to be a character and they teach you this dance.

(Check out the above post for some more Disney World insights!)

If I haven't told you that story here then I will tell you that story next time, but one of the best memories of my youth was auditioning for characters. Alright guys, thanks!

S

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