This is The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is January 19th, 2021. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
Went for a long walk this morning, got out before sunrise and took in the cool mountain air. I’ve been trying to wake up and avoid social media or email right away and it’s made my mood considerably better. There’s too much going on and too much to keep up with every day, so it’s nice to have a few hours where I feel disconnected from it all. Sometimes it’s tough to fight the temptation to check my phone or engage with the online world, but I’ve also been turning my phone off for days at a time. That’s been a huge help. Trying to retreat from the digital world a little.
And yet, here I am.
This week will be a little different. No writing craft. Just pure comics talk. Skip to the end for what I’m reading and watching.
I BREATHED A BODY
Tomorrow marks the release of my new comic, I BREATHED A BODY. It’s a collaboration with Andy MacDonald (Multiple Man, Rogue Planet), Triona Farrell, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. I’ve been describing the book as a fungal nightmare about the voyeurism of violence on social media.
For the uninitiated, I BREATHED A BODY is my love letter to Clive Barker. The short pitch is Hellraiser set in Silicon Valley but it’s so much more than that. So what does that even mean?
Well, let’s unpack it.
First, I did an interview with the fantastic folks at SYFY.com about the book and you should head there to check it out. Some of this will be repeating myself, but this is my newsletter so I’m going to allow myself to be indulgent (just this once).
So I Breathed A Body came to me around the point where Logan Paul uploaded his infamous Japanese Suicide Forest video. That really stuck with me. I couldn’t believe we lived in a world where an influencer thought it was okay to upload video of a dead body and call it content. He showed it to hundreds of millions of people. It felt like this strange type of internet voyeurism taken to the logical extreme. I was reading a lot of Clive Barker at the time and it just struck me that this was the future of “content”. Transgression drives metrics on social media. It felt like eventually we’d be in a future indifferent to our suffering, indifferent to our pain, or what type of content we’re unleashing into the world. That moment is burned into my brain forever.
Mushrooms act as a central visual metaphor in the book. I’m not a big fan of talking about modern society with a full 1:1 reflection of reality. For a variety of reasons - but primarily because if it's too close to reality the book becomes boring for me, the reader and the art team. No one wants to look at people staring at their iPhones or using Facebook.
Around the time that I was outlining IBAB, I became obsessed with foraging mushrooms. I live in the pacific northwest and it’s a mushroom mecca. My obsession evolved into learning everything about fungus, and their purely untapped potential in the world of science. They became these strange creatures to me - neither living nor dead and scarcely understood from a scientific perspective. I devoured Merlin Sheldrake’s incredible non-fiction novel Entangled Life and it changed me.
I knew IBAB was going to be inspired by Clive Barker and duality is a persistent theme in this work. This idea that there’s a razor thin line between pleasure and pain, life and death, etc. Mushrooms are a natural fit within this framework. Many species are neither living nor dead, they can transform biological material without living themselves, they can take root in concrete, repurpose rot… the possibilities are endless. But more than anything, they are these vastly connected creatures with no central nervous system, no evolutionary hierarchy, no fixed place within nature. They are decentralized and yet they touch everything in nature. Mushrooms are this incredibly apt way to talk about the vast and sprawling world of the internet.
So, IBAB is actually centered around a new type of mycelium based internet, MyceaNet and the main cast consists of people who work for the CEO of MyCena Biotechnology. A company that’s changed and remade the world with mushrooms. Oh, and their CEO just happens to be the father of the most popular influencer in the world.
Mylo Caliban is my skewering of the shithead prankster kids who dominate YouTube. He’s been raised by social media, doesn’t know the meaning of accountability, and can’t bring himself to have empathy for anything other than his brand. He’s only a small piece of the IBAB puzzle, but make no mistake, Mylo is a piece of shit and you shouldn’t like him. That’s kinda the point. This book is about the folks behind the scenes who are forced to engineer likes, subscribers, and shares for the purpose of generating tons of user data for advertisers.
We’ve spent most of the last five years watching horrific things happen in real time and we’ve become largely apathetic to transgression. The social media landscape is changing constantly due to the combined effects of racial injustice, live streamed violence, COVID-19, Q-Anon, and encroaching fascism in America.
The greatest threat to our psychological and physical wellbeing isn’t technology in and of itself - but large scale monopolies masquerading as tools of self expression. Facebook, Google, and Apple (and on and on) are controlling the way we live our lives not because they are inherently useful but because they have crushed competition and restructured society based on the needs of their platforms. These giant monopolies profit from trauma induced by systemic and societal failure. We have no means to express our collective pain but through these services. And that, my friends, is really really bad.
Finally, I need to talk about the team. Andy was a natural fit for this project. His incredibly detailed line work, his highly expressive character acting, and his natural storytelling combine to give IBAB a real emotional and disgusting punch. I’ve been a fan of Andy for years, and when the chance to work together came up - I jumped all over it. There is a sincere effort to gross you out and I knew that Andy could communicate the revolting nature of what we wanted to capture. He’s someone who can literally draw anything. And despite all the horrific shit on the page, there’s a sincere emotional core behind it all, where you can see the pain on people’s faces and empathize with it. That was key because it all means nothing if you don’t empathize with those lost in this madness.
I’ve worked with (colorist) Triona on a few random projects at Marvel and was always a huge fan of her work. It was important to me that the book, as disgusting as it may be, was always beautiful to look at and exist in. I wanted things to have a slightly 1970’s feel that communicated a vibrancy and warmth that exists in most of the horror movies I adore. Triona rose to the challenge and completely knocked things out of the park. There’s a slight stench of rot behind everything she’s done on the book.
And finally, letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. This is my third collaboration with Hass, and we worked together to create a unique style of the lettering that both evokes the corporate world in which the book is set, but contains hints of rot right there on the surface. The end result looks like a highlighter going over the text of the book instead of bolding and works to subtly communicate the themes and world. AND that fucking weird fungal symbol… more to unpack there. But not today.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my long and winding explanation about the book and some of the thought process that went into making it. I do hope you’ll join us tomorrow. It’s going to be a wild ride.
What I’m watching:
BABYTEETH - A terminally ill teen falls for a dirtbag drug dealer in this fantastic Aussie coming of age film. Anchored by powerful performances and characters who don’t really react with the typical poise and grace to the tragedy of what’s happening. I feel like most movies of this sort aim to be comedic and light given the subject matter, this is not that. I found this movie to be incredibly refreshing. It’s sweet, sobering, and funny. Eliza Scanlen (Sharp Objects, Pretty Women) is incredible in the lead role, and her dirtbag love interest Moses (Toby Wallace) is impossible to resist. It’s now streaming on Netflix and I highly recommend it.
THE DARK AND THE WICKED - A tense horror movie about two siblings who return to their decayed family farm to care for their sick parents. Directed by Bryan Bertino (The Strangers) this is easily one of the best original horror movies of 2020. It’s a slow descent into dread punctured by really great character work. Everything in this movie is dying or decayed, the visual horror is incredible but is marred by some really distracting musical cues. I didn’t much care for the ending. Even still, it’s well worth your time.
FIRST COW - A meditative Western set in the pacific northwest frontier. Kelly Reichardt's film is gorgeous, gentle, and relatively simple. A quiet story of two friends who want to make a living selling buttermilk biscuits. I didn't love it, but I did admire it.
What I’m reading:
CABAL - Just finished this Clive Barker novella for the first time. The story follows Boone, who after being convinced by his psychiatrist that he is responsible for a whole host of murders, flees to the semi-fantastical Midian, a crypt inhabited by shape-shifting monsters who call themselves the Nightbreed.
The novella far exceeds the film. It is powerful and enduring. Perhaps Clive’s masterwork after The Great and Secret Show, there’s a palpable sense of dread mixed with wonder on every page. Clive’s prose is poetic and haunting, every chapter stopped me dead in my tracks fawning over the lyrical nature of the horror. Proving there is beauty in death.
If you consider yourself a Clive Barker fan and haven’t read this - change that.
Tiny Scabs
Bad news: Many overheated forests may soon release more carbon than they absorb. Read it, get angry, then push for responsible climate policy where ever you live.
Cool read that is definitely part of my research for something new I’m working on. Will it ever be possible to share dreams?
Guillermo del Toro interviews the Coen Brothers. Just watched this the other night and it’s a wonderful deep dive into the Coen’s filmography and decision making behind the camera.
This week’s playlist:
Peace
Another week. The last under the Trump presidency. Here’s to a quieter news cycle and perhaps less anxiety about the state of the world.
Stay safe, stay healthy,
Z