a writer's notebook
Looks like it’s out in October (UK) IUS+). This is the book that was made into the film starring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Brian Cox. I got to introduce my daughter to Bruce Wills and Helen Mirren, and I used my payment from the film to buy her a pony. Beat that. Lovely to see this little book stay in print thanks to our friends at DC.
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Out on July 1, but arrived here two days ago – a reprint of THE AUTHORITY by me, Bryan, Paul Neary and Laura DePuy Martin (the latter two of whom used to have full cover credit, Laura at mine and Bryan’s (and John Cassaday’s, on PLANETARY) insistence, and I don’t know when that changed). In a new “compact edition – 360 pages at 6×9, a more bookshop-friendly format. It actually works quite well, and may appeal to younger readers in that size. A handy ten bucks in the US, a hair over seven quid in the UK.
Horrifying to think that work is more than 25 years old now.
THE AUTHORITY COMPACT EDITION (UK) (US+)
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Arrived yesterday, out mid-June – a HUGE compendium containing several hundred pages of some of my earliest (mid-1990s) work for Marvel Comics. How huge?
That is a hefty sod. A hundred and fifty dollars worth, apparently, 133 in the UK. I am not going to open it, because all I will see are the stupid and wrong things I wrote.
FANTASTIC FOUR DOOM 2099 OMNIBUS (UK) (US+)
Comments closedOne way into a new piece of work is the CITIZEN KANE position. It’s Orson Welles giving the answers in this interview:
A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.
Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?
A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.
“I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t do.” It’s an invitation to forget what you know and come to a space fresh. Imagine that whatever form or function in front of you is an impossible machine for presenting dreams. And instead of deciding the machine cannot possibly generate any given dream, figure out what you have to do to it to make it work right.
Decide you don’t know it’s impossible, and do it anyway.
THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT was a medium that I haven’t, strictly speaking, worked in before, so there was A Plan for it. The plan was: Deliberately Carelessly Bad First Drafts. In this method, the goal is to just get to the end while having everything make some kind of vague sense. Once you see the script as a whole, you can fix it up, but you have to get to the end of the script first without constantly second-guessing yourself as to whether you’re nailing it or not.
You have to let yourself be Bad At It. Empty out everything you’ve been thinking about the job on to the page and don’t worry about whether it’s any good or not. You need it all out in front of you so you can see it all properly in all its horror.
Ideally, you should never show those drafts to anyone. But I have two trusted co-producers, so I sent them on for notes, which help clarify the rewrite goals. Sometimes you want to be left alone to sort it out yourself, sometimes you know that it’s Wrong in so many particulars that you want extra eyes on it to catch all the Wrongs.
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Benefiting the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, three digital bundles of a selection of my works with Image Comics.
Because a society without proper bookshops is no society at all, and even a little bit of help is better than none at all.
It runs for a couple of weeks, I believe.
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This giant thing was laid by the front door like a paving slab last week. Presumably this is Marvel gearing up for FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS and the two AVENGERS fiilns. At a glance, it’s me, Bendis, Millar, and Carey writing, Kubert, Immonen and Jae Lee art. Contains my hated goat-legged Doctor Doom. You won’t see that in the films!
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR OMNIBUS (UK) (US+)
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This vasty tome thumped down on my doorstep this morning and almost cracked a paving stone.
The small print suggests my contribution to this monolith of a reprint is the STARJAMMERS bit I did with the late Carlos Pacheco, a man so beloved in his home town that he was given two medals and a street was named after him. I was lucky enough to work with him a handful of times in the early stage of his American career – I have a feeling it was Marie Javins who brought him into Marvel. Bob Harras took notice quickly, and he was soon taken off my books and teamed with writers whose books actually sold. This worked out well for everyone, as I finished my time in the X-Books office with the superb Casey Jones (who I think was found by the excellent Suzanne Gaffney) and Carlos became an American industry legend.
Anyway. I presume this book is now available in any comics store or bookshop with shelves strong enough to hold it.
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My first thought on taking it out of the box was, “jesus, Jim, this is huge.” Because Jim, or JH Williams III to you, wanted a permanent hardcover edition that would sit right next to his catalogue of fine art editions. But it is a much larger book than I was expecting. Mr Williams took the lead on this one precisely because he wanted it to match his other books, and I just approved the designs and watched him make something marvellous, which was frankly very relaxing. It’s a lovely thing to own, and one of my own favourite pieces.
DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHAZARD EDITION is out now.
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Got a stupid heavy box last week, only just got around to opening it, and, shit, I thought this was coming out next year. Amazon still says it’s out next year and has it on pre-order.. But here’s copies. So weird to see work from twenty-five-plus years ago under one cover. But also lovely to see Tom and Bryan’s art from back then all over again.
Trivia: I kept the character Swift from the previous run because she was created by the previous writer’s daughter and I thought she’d like to see her character continue. I have no idea if she ever did, but I hated the idea of a young kid opening a copy and not seeing her own character there.
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