Hullo.
Invitation To The Party
Waste
Cripes
Life, Death and Knights
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
Big news: the DIE RPG Kickstarter goes live on May 12th.
Coo at the Stephanie cover. Coo!
Lots more next time, and for the weeks following – I need to write some essays for the campaign next. Deeply excited to finally be doing this.
You can sign up for an immediate mail when it goes live here.
Once & Future returns with issue 25 for its fifth arc. The arc title isn't really a spoiler, but as I do a title drop, I won't mention it yet, as you want to have that moment, right? This arc cascades from everything's been set up so far, and I'm really happy with it. Like, it motors. I'm also smile at myself. When I started the last arc, my plan was to take things down a gear and do a sort of mystical Walking Dead bit survival horror for a while. And I kind of did... but there's a moment in this first issue where I looked at the spectacular ultra-high octane berserk action of Dan's art, and realised that whole grounded thing may have gone out the window. And I love that.
It's available in comic shops and digitally, and you can read the preview here.
Also, it's Free Comic Book Day on Saturday, which means...
Included among excellent other stories is Dustin Weaver and myself doing a prologue for AXE: Judgment Day. This was a real joy to do. I always love working with Dustin, but this is a uniquely grim little walk through the Marvel Universe, while also having a whole lot of superhero pop. I've only done one FCBD book before (Mercury Heat, for Avatar) and I love the idea of doing something that's put in the hands of so many people, some of whom have never read comics before. Hope you enjoy it, and do buy stuff as well as grabbing the freebies.
Oh, and as it is FCBD....
However, there's a major caveat here: I'm presently Covid positive.
I'm going to carry on testing this week. Hopefully, I'll turn negative at the back end of the week. If not, we'll have to cancel.
Sorry to be Schroedinger's Signing. Fingers crossed.
I've released a couple more episodes of Decompressed.
First, Benjamin Percy about the X Lives and Deaths of Wolverine.
Second, Tini Howard about Knights of X #1.
There's a gap in X release schedule due to the slipped release schedule due to supply chain “stuff”, but I'll be releasing more shortly. I think it's Vita on New Mutants and then Si on Legion of X? Or the other way around. That sounds about right.
- Neal Adams passed this week. He's not someone I've ever met, and his work and impact had mostly happened before I was reading comics... but he was such a titan that his shadow – both in his art and his advocacy – stretched on. Chip writes on him here, brilliantly, and Tom Brevoort does too.
- Amal linked to this New Yorker interview with the Mountain Goat's John Darnielle in her latest newsletter, and it's amazing work. So much stuff here, about art, life, faith, games, whatever you want, it's got it.
- Neil Kulkarni was one of my big music journo heroes in the 1990s, and he's still doing great work. He's running a newsletter for paid subscribers, but he's still occasionally releasing great pieces for free. Here's his response to Prince's passing
- Douglas Wolk, author of All The Marvels, did this handy reading list for the Krakoan age of Marvel. Folks have been asking me “What do I need to read to catch up” and this is a great answer. It's also less intimidating that it may look at first glance – Doug's offering you various routes and guidance.
- Deb Chachra writes about resilience, abundance and decentralisation. Lots of good stuff here to think about, and a really inspiring view of what we could choose to do with the future of energy.
- I've been excited by Ma Nishtana ever since I heard about it, and glad to see it Kickstarting. A kind of Do Your Own Version Of Exodus game? It sounds powerful, healing and really human.
- I believe I've linked to articles about the banning of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer before, but this NY Times article goes into it a lot. It's really strong work, and I recommend it. Comics are always the books that's easiest to ban, because guardians can just glance at it, and decide what they see is offensive or not. Prose hides. We don't get to do that.
- X is for Podcast had a really kind discussion about our first arc on Eternals. Great to see folk get so much from it.
- My friend Jordan Erica Weber did a public note on her thinking behnd retiring from Twitter." Twitter is the ultimate unpaid work for exposure" is the line I'll be chewing over, which nails some precise things down. I've been inching ever closer to that over time too. Even five years ago I was thinking of changing the twitter personality to a Robot (Kieron Gillen 3000) and just tweeting news updates about myself in a robotic voice.
- With Roe V Wade, Laurie Penny put the full chapter on Reproductive Rights on her substack. It's a lot, because this is a lot.
The world's hellish, and the news about Roe v Wade is wrenching. With the centrifugal parental pull of my life right now, I'm aware there's relatively little space for anything else, but I try to take stuff aboard, even if I'm not broadcasting outwards. I'm often stuck on what to say that I could feel is in any way useful or helpful. I think of something a friend of mine said a few years ago, with obvious despair: I didn't think I'd have to spend the rest of my life fighting fascism.
Yet here we are.
As I said above, I'm presently Covid positive. We had the filming of the video for DIE on Thursday, and me and all the RRD folk have picked it up somewhere in town. My suspicion is over lunch afterwards, but you just don't know. All I know is that after two and a half years of this, I've got a line on the test staring back at me.
So far, I've been very lucky. I feel fine. Yesterday was the worst symptoms I've had, and it's only on the level of a mild cold, at worst. The problems are born of having covid, and how much weight that throws on C for childcare as I isolate as much as I can away from them. As a new parent, the impotence and guilt is very real. Hearing Iris cry and not being able to do anything to help. Knowing that I'm getting full night's sleep in the spare room, just because I am plague dad. This is not easy for me, but also much harder for C, to say the least.
The only good thing is that as I'm still able to work, so I am, and as there's not much else I can do, that's what I'm doing. I've done my pass on the editor's notes for the hardest stuff in the DIE RPG manuscript. AXE 5 went over last week, which is a LOT, and seeing Valerio's pages come back on 4 is everything. I've written the opening of an issue of Immortal X-men so the artist can work on that (It's an issue in 2 time periods, so I don't need to worry about continuity between the sections), and now am moving onto the first of several specials I said I'd write. As I think I said last time, these next two months are... uniquely difficult, in terms of how demands on my time have aligned. The DIE manuscript and the Marvel event, both with everything they entail? It's not impossible, but involves careful arranging of what time I have, and trying to create support systems to ensure I don't just collapse. Knowing that when all this is over my workload implodes to something smaller than it's been for literally decades is a useful thing to look forward to.
(I'm also trying to avoid accidentally taking on more work, which is proving worryingly achievable, as I haven't got the spare brain space to think of anything else I could write right now.)
So, yeah, it would be a bad time to be laid out with covid. Fingers crossed.
On a brighter note: when I was first writing this, I looked up to see a tiny fox cub making its way down the garden away from me. The smallest, cutest thing. Later, C saw it try to menace a magpie, which visibly tilted its head in full "Pull the other one, mate." It's so small, I was worried it had somehow got trapped in our garden, but a careful examination of the perimeter reveals a hole it could pass through, and make its way to the overgrown garden nearby where the foxes live.
Anyway: tiny fox, adorable, not trapped.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London.
3.5.2022